Broken, The

Posted May 24, 2012 by Speed - 0 comments

Gine McVey’s father is about to retire and to celebrate the family has put together a surprise diner. The evening is pleasant for everyone up to the end when suddenly a large mirror breaks and falls down. A few days after, Gina is standing in a phone booth in London when she sees a Jeep passing by with in it a woman looking exactly as her. She decides to follow the car as it goes into a nearby parking lot.

Little later, Gina is driving with the Jeep and gets in a car accident and wakes up in a hospital with hardly any memory about what happened left. Only some fragments appear now and then and the unsettling nature of those make her decide to investigate to find out what happened. However, she’s got no idea what she’s getting herself into…

Sound and Vision:
The image is very stylized and shows very nice pictures from London but is also a bit on the soft side. Compression errors are absent but some more detail here and there wouldn’t have hurt. Overall a pretty standard transfer.

The soundtrack nicely uses the surround speakers and subwoofer to add some atmosphere but the music tends to fain volume at times that you’re really wondering why as nothing is happening. Nothing wrong with the technical side (which is actually pretty good) but the director clearly has a problem with building tension.

Extras:
None

Conclusion:
The Broken tells a subtle story of horror with more atmospheric images than actual dialogue or plain violent scenes. The director has taken the suspense of Edgar Allen Poe and Alfred Hitchcock and wrapped it around a story that has some resemblances with the idea of “Body Snatchers”. No aliens here though, it’s more about doppelgangers coming from another dimension laying behind the image of a mirror. There’s plenty of psychological mystery to this movie but in the end it always comes down to one thing: is it fun to watch.

Unfortunately, The Broken may have a solid psychological basis, is rooted in plenty of mythologies, has a decent cast and a good story to tell, but it is so slow and tries to bring tension to scenes where nothing is happening that the viewer can easily get distracted by a car passing by outside. Indeed, it’s boring!

I’m sure there are fans of this genre that will love the movie but overall it’s too slow and contains too little action to keep the average viewer interested.

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