When a Family Vanishes: The Many Truths Behind Fractured
There are some thrillers, like \”Fractured, \” that are able to people wondering and asking questions about \”what is memory, how is memory manipulable, … what is sanity, how is sanity manipulable, what is trust, how is trust manipulable … and how do all these interact and interweave to form the mind and its architecture? A more humanistic formulation is: How do all these interweave form the mind and shape human life?\”
Fractured\’s talent, like its director Brad Anderson, is to create a fusion of thrill, entertainment, and rich existential wisdom defying the boundaries of the psyche. The harmony created by Fractured\’s crew of actors is most remarkable, knowing that, unlike their characters, the actors of Fractured operated without unity of mind and emotion to construct their world as a will of their own. Lost, inspired, and to varying degrees, these actors had their own secrets and private worlds. Each of them shaped worlds that crystallized the story of Fractured as it reached the audience to overwhelm minds and human hearts. This is also the story of these Fractured players. It is a story about the fragments of their souls. The secrets and shadows that these players managed to integrate into their performances, like the souls of the night that flow into their own lives, thus illuminating and completing the world of their inner art. This is a story of a male character losing everything. However, it is more about the people who performed those fragments. This is the story and the world of those Fractured players. The story is about the voids, the fragments of their souls, the pieces of these players that lost everything, constructed mere shadows and managed to transform these shadows into their art.
The Drive into The Unknown
This film commences with Ray Monroe (Sam Worthington) who is driving with his wife Joanne (Lily Rabe) and their young child Peri on an empty stretch of an American highway. This scene is an idyllic image of a family returning from a family get-together. But based on the silence throughout the vehicle, the audience is made aware that this is not a family in peace, and that tension exists, even if it is not expressed verbally. There exists an uncomfortable tension, with an almost overwhelming presence of the uncommunicated.
When, out of nowhere, Peri accidentally tumbles into a construction pit of a gas station, the family is forced to go to a hospital. Tests and scans, confusion and blank stares from the nurses. Then everything goes white. Ray’s wife and daughter, who joined him a moment earlier, seem to vanish into thin air. There is no paperwork, no suspicious hospital staff, no records – they are simply gone. It is as if Ray arrived there all alone.
Yet the more Ray tries to prove that they did exist, the more complicated it is and the more the audience is vanished into the same darkness of Ray’s mind. This becomes a deep, unrelenting labyrinth of self-questioning.
What sets Fractured apart is not just its ending but its other aspects as well. It is as if you are seeing things through Ray’s eyes. Sam Worthington encapsualtes this vision as he portrays Ray. In a remarkable way, Worthington’s own lifestory provides a backdrop for an emotional impact that this film elicits.
The Fractured Reality of Sam Worthington
Having completed Avatar, Sam Worthington’s career expanded to a new level. The film was a huge global success and propelled Worthington to stardom. However, with stardom came an added pressure to constantly evolve and adapt to a new identity. Worthington’s accounts of his life speak of an internal struggle that comes when one is confronted with a new identity, fame, and a series missteps, all of which force a person to reassess their own life.
While elements of running are constant in many of his characters, Ray Monroe too, is evidence of this pursuit while attempting to outrun one\’s own guilt, one\’s own memory, or one’s own trauma. There is a running theme of past alcoholism, married struggles, and fears of being an unfit father. Worthington speaks of self doubt in his life, and to some degree, self reflection, can easily parallel to the shaking desperation Ray feels within. Worthington’s struggles are contradictory to the character he portrays in his physical presence. Every character he portrays, every character, that requires a fast pace walk, and an anxious mind who is searching every face he passes, is in stark contrast to the successful life he is living. Worthington is a man who suffers the challenges of anxiety, and the character, i suppose, suffers the challenges of inner turmoil and a world that, like anxiety, is constantly shifting beneath him. Worthington has stated that characters with stark realism and what he terms, \”messy humanity\” are his favourite. He describes in depth constructions of Ray Monroe, a man, in his own right, who is nothing but messy humanity and in the hands of Sam, Monroe in Ray’s hands in his own right becomes a life like character, not exactly a real one, but very real in the sense of an everyman in our lives. He becomes the person we spot in our locality or in a newspaper, someone who we are afraid is losing, or will lose surrounding family, a person who has to face with the harsh and disturbing reality , will lose the family he has.
Lily Rabe: A Quiet Force Behind the Storm
The emotional universe Rabe brought to the role of Joanne is fascinating. Identified for her remarkable work in the American Horror Story series, Rabe has consistently chosen characters that require a unique inner strength — women who suffer, who are the emotional bedrock of families, who wear a smile while carrying hidden emotional struggles. The character Joanne, who has deep internal conflict, is beautifully complemented by Rabe’s real life experience of the pressures of motherhood, public life, and career.
Despite only appearing on screen for brief moments, Rabe’s portrayal of Joanne is that of a woman who has suffered deeply and is tired. If Ray is the storm, Joanne is the pressure that has been building up in silence. Rabe has discussed her affinity toward authentic representation of mothers in her interviews, something that has also been a great source of inspiration for her. This authenticity is deeply felt in the earlier parts of Fractured, when the tension and connection between the characters Joanne and Ray in a glance, tell the story of a deeply complicated marriage.
Understanding the Film — As Well As What Was Not Intended
Part of what makes Fractured so emotionally moving is the commentary on nuancing mental health related issues, but not quite directly. It is interesting to note how the film does not give Ray a mental health diagnosis, nor give him a label, but this is intentional. The production team wanted the audience to fully experience the confusion, not just see it on a screen.
An easily missed, but interesting behind the scenes detail is how Sam Worthington asked not to be shown the full shooting schedule. This meant that Sam’s emotional disorientation on set would be consistent with Ray’s disorientation. He wouldn’t always know what scene was going to be filmed next, which is perfectly in parallel with Ray’s deteriorating mental state.
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