Broken

(Simon Boyes & Adam Mason, 2006)

The opening of this film does not fuck about. We get a brief glimpse into the everyday life of the main character (just enough to establish that she’s a single mother) and then we’re dumped straight into the heart of horror-central, as she wakes up in a wooden box with no indication how she got there.* A day later, she is freed from the box, knocked unconscious, and awakes to find herself caught in a deadly trap from which she must escape or die.** When she finally struggles free, her captor appears, puts a rifle to her head, and asks “Will you continue?”
This has to be one of the most powerful and promising openings to a horror film I’ve seen since Tears of Kali (the first scene of which involves a woman cutting off her own eyelids with a pair of scissors). The problem is, it's too powerful and too promising. It makes the events that follow seem tame by comparison and lends the film an overall sense of anti-climax that never quite fades away. Indeed, the majority of Broken has more in common with a run-of-the-mill hostage thriller than a horror film, as the story traces the day-to-day interactions and subtly developing power-plays between the captive and her captor as she is kept chained up in an isolated woodland encampment and forced to perform menial chores such as washing pans and tending a small vegetable garden. When a third character is introduced—a schoolgirl who also survives the initial ‘test’ and is enslaved at the camp—the film almost begins to mimic a domestic abuse drama, with the older woman as a ‘mother’ desperately trying to placate a hysterical ‘daughter’ before her constant wailing induces the rage of an abusive ‘father’. Despite further scenes of violence (and a very effective shock ending) I couldn’t help but feel badly let down. The film’s opening gambit led me to believe that what I was about to witness would be a relentlessly brutal succession of senseless and sadistic trials to make Hostel look like The Care Bears Movie. What I actually witnessed was often no more unsettling than watching Reed and Donohoe bickering away at each other in Castaway. I have to admit that Broken does offer some impressive low-budget drama and suspense; but it's not the kind of horror I’d been hoping for.

* The idea of a character waking up imprisoned with no idea how or why seems to recur so frequently these days that it may be justifiable to regard it as a sub-genre in its own right. Recent examples include: Oldboy (2003), the Saw films (2004 onwards), Zulo (aka Hole) (2005), Haze (2005), and House of 9 (2005) … not forgetting the Cube series (1997 onwards), several early Twilight Zone episodes such as “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” (1961), and an episode of NBC’s Experiments in Television series, “The Cube”, which can be downloaded here.

** Once again, the Saw films spring to mind. However, Broken achieves a much more gruesome atmosphere than these films, with less reliance on fancy-schmancy editing. The scene in question here is certainly not recommended viewing for the squeamish. If the representative of the Leeds Film Festival who introduced its screening is to be believed, it caused at least one member of the audience at the previous week’s screening to pass out.

Broken @ IMDb