Although best known to date for making the high concept Brit comedy CASHBACK, several years ago Sean Ellis made a directorial mark in the horror genre with the superior, menacing short film LEFT TURN. The imperfect but eerie BROKEN confirms his ability to wring tension and scares out of a TWILIGHT ZONE-ish premise even if, in this case, the concept may have worked better at a TWILIGHT ZONE episode length. Showing at Frightfest in the same weekend as the gaudier, goofier MIRRORS, this was also a movie playing on superstitions surrounding mirrors (here, specifically, the seven years bad luck and breaking of the soul that accompany the shattering of a mirror), though this one didn’t have Jack Bauer threatening nuns and elderly strangers.
Opening with an Edgar Allan Poe quote, the flick owes a greater debt to the nifty Roger Moore chiller THE MAN WHO HAUNTED HIMSELF (the heroine deals with apparently alternate reality versions of herself) and any given version of INVASION OF THE BODYSNATCHERS (close friends and family suddenly replaced with emotionless, hostile doppelgangers). There’s also more than a passing resemblance to a genuinely scary old HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR episode named “The Two Faces Of Evil”.
Lena Headey takes the lead as a radiologist freaked out when she sees a doppelganger of herself drive past in a car. She follows the woman to a house in London and from there on in, ominous portents – a car accident, a mirror that seems to spontaneously break during an innocuous dinner party – segue into mounting paranoia as her entire immediate family start to act very strangely, including U.S. Ambassador Richard Jenkins. They too, it seems, also have sinister, exact doubles.
Retaining ambiguity about the true nature of all the creepy duplicates, THE BROKEN occasionally falls back on bog standard only-a-nightmare scares but achieves considerable eerie power from its various moments of imposing doppelgangers emerging from the shadows or interacting with Header’s convincingly beleaguered heroine. Director Ellis finds menace in long-held shots of half-lit, seemingly empty corridors and admirably avoids viscera save for a jolting, bloody fist-down-the-throat shower murder scene.
Inevitably, there’s a twist – and a twist that turns up with the now-expected bells and whistles of an explanatory montage (“We’re gonna need a montage! Even Rocky had a montage!”). It’s not totally surprising but it still ends this neat little movie on an appropriately sinister frisson.
– Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
