3 out of 5

Directed by: Brad Anderson

There are certain directors who have made a name for themselves based on the quantity of their output, with consistency something of a variable factor. You have your Soderberghs and Miikes, who float between kind of auteur – setting aside the conversation the scope of that term – and work-for-hire approaches, while maintaining a lot of thematic or cinematic overtures, and then you have some names more squarely on the B-movie / DTV / DTS-side, where 100+ director credits is just part of their branding, essentially.

I’m not in every film forum across the internet – or am I? – but I feel like I don’t see Brad Anderson’s name often mentioned in this realm. After a buildup across some formative indies, Anderson splashed with Session 9, and then a few years later even splashier with The Machinist, and then… I dunno, I rushed out to see TransSiberian, but it felt like his name had lost some glow by that point. And then literally every 2 or so years after that, I’d see a compellingly moody trailer for something, and hey-ho – there’s Anderson’s name again. But while those early writer/director efforts pointed towards the auteur route, I think post-TransSiberian it’s easier to align Anderson with B-movies. …Except I think he’s always been making B-movies.

Fracture is a definitive Brad Anderson movie, from Session 9 onward: it’s, like, aggressively “off:” it’s scored, shot, and edited to be weird; pulling into a gas station is creepy because off the off-key piano pluckings and grey palette and the high camera angle. Yeah, that’s filmmaking in general, but Anderon’s worlds are almost hilariously / unilaterally painted in this way, completely unsubtlely. And maybe we were more naive back in the early 00s of The Machinist and etcetera, but not really: as soon as a movie is presented this way, you’re set in a state to expect weirdness, and to question what’s going on. Inevitably, Brad’s movies have some element of that weirdness then formalized – with Fracture, it’s the way everyman Ray sees secret conversations and shady backroom dealings going on at the hospital to which he’s taken his wife and injured daughter. But also inevitably, Anderson will then constantly remind the viewer: This Is All Off, And Probably Not Real, which isn’t a spoiler, because inevitably inevitably that’s followed by an equally emphasized Or Is It?

Now to be clear: the way this doublespeak is spoken aloud is highly dumb. It’s… never that compelling, or twisty. The likelihood of the answer is easily guessable. However, I am never not amused by how – I used the word before – aggressively Anderson sticks to this formula, and it then just becomes a guessing game of how far he’s going to take it before doing some reveal, and in the large handful of Anderson movies I’ve seen, he takes it past the point where I’d expect, giving me this brief “OMG this is a brilliant subversion” sparkle, before he gives me the reveal anyway. It’s hilariously consistent.

I think, on paper, these scripts hide their twists better. Alan B. McElroy has not been attached to the greatest movies, but he did work on Spawn, so that grants quite a bit of credit in my books, Ecks vs. Sever aside. Regardless, you can sense how a different director would’ve maybe waited to dial up the weird, and not overemphasized the obvious tells, but that’s how Brad does his thing. And, like, I dunno, I think the imagined other version of this is a pretty normal thriller, while Fracture gets the boost of being so aggressively… maliciously? obvious.

Anderson has stuck with cinematographer Björn Charpentier for a few films, and together, they do shoot the heck out of this thing, making the minimal locations and sets drip with chilliness, and Six Flags horror vibes. Editor Robert Mead keeps us on pace, floating between dreamlike passages and more frantic ones, the team altogether not relying too heavily on visual trickery (blurred edges; dropped frames) for too long. The creaky piano score from Anton Sanko is part of the aggressive formula I’ve doubled and tripled down on, but as such, I kinda love how in your face it is. And: Sam Worthington is great in this. I’ve had a soft spot for Sam since Clash of the Titans; I think when he’s cast not as exactly a leading man, but kind of an ineffective every man, he can be pretty perfect, and he really gets to do some character work here that, to me, feels authentic. Lily Rabe has a very particular part to play and she does it well; I’d credit Anderson with his overall stylistic approach letting folks like Stephen Tobolowsky be very naturalistic, instead of playing into genre. Is that good for the movie? Probably not, but, y’know, know what you’re getting with Brad.

In Fracture, Ray (Worthington) is driving back from a poor Thanksgiving outing with his wife, Joanne (Rabe) and their daughter, when an appropriately over-the-top accident at a gas station leads them to driving to a nearby hospital. Once there, Ray is peppered with odd questions, put through a grueling intake process, and then made to wait while his wife accompanies his daughter to a CT scan. Hours later… no one at the hospital remembers Joanne or their kid, and Ray is being told he showed up at the hospital alone.

The movie drags a bit past what could’ve been a comfortable 90 minutes, and you can probably guess what’s happening just from my summary and the first off piano plunking you hear, but I love that I can rely on Anderson to keep running on his hamster wheel of thrillers – a more-insulting-than-I-mean-it way to praise someone’s consistency of quality and vision, even if that quality is, ultimately, kinda hokey.