Broken Was Promoted as the Grown-Up Answer to Torture Horror

Unfortunately Broken throws in sufficient varying themes, including female power and post traumatic stress, to confuse the whole thing.

Written by The Horror Czar (BHM Editor Don Sumner)
October 25, 2007

Release: 2006 (U.S. DVD 2007)
Written and Directed by: Simon Boyes and Adam Mason

Starring:
Nadja Brand as Hope
Eric Colvin as The Man

Promotion and advertising can play a significant role in influencing buying and viewing behaviors. Case in point: I read a certain quote from an unnamed reviewer in an advertisement emblazened across the marquis of a website (This one, in fact...) that said “’Broken’ makes ‘Saw’ look like a children’s movie.” I hope that reviewer got some kind of kickback, because that quote was enough to drive me to Best Buy to purchase a copy for my very own. Damn my susceptibility.

Broken begins with a woman waking up trapped inside a small, dark, damp wooden box. Clearly, she is surprised by her predicament and proceeds to scream, cry, pant and pound. Finally, the terrified woman breaks free from her binding box and crawls away from the site, only to be clobbered in the face with the barrel of a shotgun.

Our hapless heroine awakens a second time, only to find herself tied to a tree by her neck, her weight supported by a teetering see-saw perched on a block of wood. She begins picking at a stitched-up wound on her abdomen with a stick (I didn’t understand why she was doing that at first…kind of dumb) and pulls all of the crude stitches out…then reaches her hand into the wound and starts digging. Very gross.

Finally the goal is achieved…the woman extracts a razor blade from the hole in her gut and cuts away at the rope around her neck. Finally, the rope is severed and she falls to the ground, but her entrails have escaped the stomach cut and intestines are intertwined with sticks and leaves. Suddenly, a Crocodile Dundee type guy (Erik Colvin) walks up to her, puts a gun to her face and asks her a simple question: “Do you want to go on?” The distraught woman, insides spread across the forest, replies “No.” So, he shoots her.

Then we meet Hope (Nadja Brand), a London girl on a blind date. The date goes well, and she excitedly relays the details to the babysitter of her young daughter. Then she goes to bed.

Unfortunately for Hope she awakes in the same predicament as the woman in the opening scene. There are two differences in Hope’s outcome from the previous victims: One, her guts do not fall out of the opening. Two, Hope‘s answer to “the question” is a resounding “Yes!” – she wants to ensure the safety of her young daughter.

It’s hard to say whether she was better off with her affirmative answer. What follows is for Hope is that she becomes Dundee’s chained slave, cleaning pots and pans at the forest camp of Dundee-guy, getting slapped around a bit and ultimately being beaten and maimed for any small transgression.

The trouble with Broken is that it doesn’t know, from one moment to the next, what it wants to be. At times it is a shock/torture horror film reminiscent of the Hostel or Saw series. At others it seems to be revenge flick ala I Spit on your Grave. There are also strong elements of a psychological treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as the victim seems to have caring for the aggressor mixed with the hopeless breaking of human spirit that one may see in Shindler’s List or Diary of Anne Frank. This final element makes it either ironic or stupidly cheesy that her name happens to be “Hope”.

In the end Broken presents all of these things, and therefore none of them. The Dundee character is never actually developed, which would be alright if he was portrayed as a random raving lunatic…but he is not. I tried and tried to piece together what his deal is, but to no avail.

Whether you are a lover of torture horror or an aficionado of tales of Post Traumatic Stress, Broken has something for you – but in either case I imagine you will leave disappointed.