Reading time: 7 minutes
What happens when your mind turns into your worst enemy? In Fractured, a chilling psychological thriller movie by Brad Anderson, pulls us deep into a maze of trauma, paranoia and distorted memories. For anyone interested in the intersection of these genres, I personally believe Fractured as a must-watch. Everything you believed to be true about the protagonist, the plot, and possibly even our own sense of reality is called into question as reality falls apart in front of us. The unsettling narrative makes it a fascinating study for psychology enthusiasts.
Warning: Spoilers ahead!! This review may delve into the twist and revelations of the movie that are key to the film’s psychological intrigue.
Storyline summary
The story follows Ray Monroe (the protagonist), a seemingly loving father and husband travelling with his wife, Joanne, and daughter Peri, across the country. Ray and Joanne have a subtle argument as Joanne complains about Ray’s driving and her frustration with his past behaviour, adding some emotional depth to their dynamics. They stop at a rest stop for Peri to use the bathroom, to buy some batteries for her small electronic device and the family take a break. While Joanne is inside the convenience store, Ray and Peri are outside, and Peri, being curious and playful chasing a balloon, starts wandering around. At one point, Peri approaches the edge of a construction site nearby, and a dog tries to get closer to her. In an attempt to save Peri from both dogs and falling from the edge he tried to calm Peri and throw a stone at the dog. In her fright, she slips and falls into the pit. Ray tries to stop her and reaches out to grab her, but they both fall and are injured. After Peri suffers a fall and breaks her arm, the family rushes to a nearby hospital. Peri is taken for scans, and Ray is told to wait while Joanne accompanies her downstairs. However, when Ray wakes up after briefly dozing off in the waiting room, his wife and daughter are nowhere to be found. What starts off as a routine ER visit quickly devolves into anxiety and confusion as Ray claims they have disappeared without a trace, and the hospital staff denies ever having seen them. They claim that there’s no record of Peri or Joanne ever being there. Ray starts to feel like he’s in a nightmare-no one believes him, and the hospital staff act as if he’s imagining everything. This triggers his panic, as he’s convinced something sinister is happening, like the hospital is hiding something. The plot develops into a suspenseful mystery as the tension escalates, the dark and unsettling atmosphere deepens as Ray’s grip on reality weakens, leading to a final twist that leaves both the protagonist and the viewer questioning what really happened.
The story unfolds through the experiences and perspectives of different characters, each of them playing a key role in shaping the psychological twists of the plot. Let me breakdown further, how the movie’s events are viewed through the eyes of different characters involved.
From Ray’s point of view, the world around him becomes increasingly hostile and deceitful. He is driven by intense urgency and fear as he attempts to save his daughter. Joanne tried to stay calm after Per’s fall, focusing on getting help at the hospital. After being taken to the hospital, they were treated like any other case following standard protocol, checking Peri into the system and preparing for treatment under Dr. Berthram and as Peri’s taken for tests. After that they disappeared. At first, the staff appears helpful, but as Ray grows suspicious, they seem to become distant and uncooperative to his quest to find his family to feed into Ray’s and the viewer’s fear of possible conspiracy cover-up. Then, Ray seeks help of police officers named Len and Childers in to investigate who tried to make sense of the situation and took Ray’s claims seriously, even though the other involved parties’ claims, unhelpful CCTV recordings suggest a different truth.
From the perspective of the hospital staff, Ray Monroe is a distraught and increasingly unstable man who came to the hospital for a minor head injury and waited for his family to come. They viewed Ray’s acting irrationally, possibly due to the head injury he sustained during the fall at the rest stop. While Ray believes that the hospital is part of a larger conspiracy, the staff sees a man whose mental state seems to be deteriorating, leading them to involve additional resources, such as security and a psychologist to assess the situation.
Dr. Jacobs, a psychologist, is pivotal in furthering the tension between Ray’s perception of events and reality. She approaches Ray with empathy, attempting to de-escalate his growing panic. Her calm demeanour contrasts sharply with Ray’s erratic behaviour, positioning her as a voice of reason in a chaotic situation. By treating Ray with compassion, she embodied the hospital’s non-threatening stance, making the viewer further question Ray’s version of events. Dr. Jacobs explores Ray’s mental state by asking probing questions about what he remembers and how reliable those memories are. This moment serves as a turn point, planting seeds of doubt about Ray’s version of the story. Her careful inquiries suggest that Ray may be suffering from trauma from a car crash eight years ago that claimed the life of his first wife or a delusion, further blurring the line between truth and fiction in the narrative.
She doesn’t outright accuse Ray of being mentally unstable, but her presence forces both Ray and the viewers to reconsider the reliability of his account. However, she brings Ray back to the rest stop to help him confront the reality of what happened there as she hopes to trigger the repressed memories. At the rest stop she brings him to walk him through his version of events and encourages him to notice the inconsistencies between his memory and reality. There they discovered the bloodstain of Peri took on a patch of construction work and one more bloodstain in the near distance. Dr. Jacobs hoped to make Ray realize that his wife and daughter are not missing, they were never at the hospital to begin with. And tried to disrupt his false memories and get him to confront the unbearable reality he’s been denying Peri’s fatal accident and Joanne’s death as a result of his action. They came to the conclusion that Ray caused the fall and death of his family allowing Ray to question his reality. In the make him realisation process psychologist also denied Ray’s story about the dog who caused Peri’s fall. In the moment of traumatic grief, he came to believe the psychologist’s explanation as true. Suddenly the same dog appears in the construction site. This ultimate reality pulls the viewer again into twist to believe Ray’s version of story as the dog wasn’t a fake imagination as psychologists reasoned and Ray is not as delusional at all. He doubles down on his perspective, firm in the belief that something conspiracy is happening at the hospital.
The plot becomes a most intense scene as Ray sneaks into the hospital’s basement, where he uncovers what he believes to be an organ-harvesting operation. His paranoia peaks as he convinces himself that Joanne and Peri are being held there, awaiting surgery to have their organs harvested. In a desperate bid to save them, Ray kills a security guard and bursts into an operating theatre to interrupt the extraction of organs from his family. The ‘rescuing’ family from the hospital, Ray drives away, convinced that he has saved his wife and daughter from a sinister plot. As the sun rises, he feels triumphant, driving away with his family in the backseat of his car, believing they are finally safe.
The camera zooms out, the viewer is shown the devastating truth.
A tragic twist
Ray’s heroic rescue is nothing more than a tragic delusion. The film shows the audience that Ray is alone, and that the people he believes are Joanne and Peri in the backseat are not there at all, instead a guy who is a patient still unconscious from anaesthesia, with no connection to Ray. In the heartbreaking conclusion of Fractured, the true nature of Ray’s actions is revealed. His mind fractured under the weight of immense trauma from the past and the incident and guilt, leading him to create an elaborate delusion. The fall Ray and Peri took at the rest stop was fatal for his daughter. In a panic and emotional breakdown, Ray has accidently killed his wife Joanne, by pushing her onto a nail, which impaled her head. Unable to cope with the horror of what had happened, Ray’s mind splintered, blocking out the reality of their deaths. Throughout the film, Ray’s distorted perception of reality leads him to believe that his wife and daughter were alive, missing somewhere in the hospital. The hospital staff’s behaviour and actions were always professional and rational. In truth, their bodies had been in the trunk of his car the entire time.
Fractured ends on a chilling note, leaving viewers to reflect on the destructive power of the mind when overwhelmed by grief and guilt. The protagonist’s psychosis represents a final, tragic escape from reality- one where he can still hold onto the illusion that he was a good father and husband, even though the truth is far more tragic.
It’s a haunting reminder that the most dangerous landscapes aren’t outside us—they’re the ones our minds create. In Ray’s case, the most terrifying aspect of the film isn’t the hospital staff or the missing family—it’s his own mind, betraying him in the most fundamental way possible.
- What do you think? Did you notice any early clues throughout the film that hinted at Ray’s fractured perception of reality?
- Can you relate to the idea of the brain shielding us from painful memories?
Nishara C. Perera
nishara.chathurangi@gmail.com
A.P.E. 
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