Here is a film from a director with a little more imagination and skill than story-telling sense. It’s a horror thriller about a thirtysomething London radiologist Gina (Lena Headey), who watches a doppelgänger of herself driving by in a car and finds something very nasty in the woodshed. These phenomena are possibly the result of her swollen brain, since she has just survived a bad car accident.
However, Sean Ellis — who wrote the screenplay as well as directed — wants us to believe that Gina’s sudden and unexplained breaking of a mirror while celebrating her father’s birthday is the reason behind her run of increasingly bad luck.
The Broken is very different from Cashback, Ellis’s romantically inclined first feature, which was made from the bones of his Oscar-nominated short film of 2004. This seems to have been designed to show that Ellis saw a few movies before he thought of making any. I lost count of the tributes he pays, to Hitchcock’s Psycho, to Alien and European frighteners such as Clouzot’s Wages of Fear.
Undoubtedly, however, the cinematography and editing of this Anglo-French production are smart and stylish — and even if the whole ultimately seems portentous, there are many bits and pieces that are genuinely well done.
Occasionally there’s a smile on the director’s face but more often the action is backed by a morbid-sounding score that sounds like it was written by a good composer feeling a trifle under the weather.
Headey looks stunning throughout and proves a more than capable actress as Gina’s world collapses around her. And if Richard Jenkins is a bit wasted as her father, Ellis’s work transcends much dramatic orthodoxy. The cast have to work gingerly around his cinematic tropes.
This is a grey and grim London where anything could happen. And, believe me, it does. Don’t go home in the Tube after it.
The Broken
Cert: 15
