A slick but unscary spine-chiller.
Comment
02/05/09
The Broken (2009)
31
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:26
Fresh:8
Rotten:18
Average Rating:4/10
Consensus: A British chiller lacking in strongly drawn characters, The Broken feels unfinished and undercooked.
Rated: 15
Genre: Horror/Suspense
Theatrical Release:30-01-2009
Synopsis: Lena Headey (TV's TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES) stars in this disturbing horror film as a woman who glimpses someone who looks just like her. In her search for answers, she comes to the... [More]
Starring: Lena Headey, Richard Jenkins, Ulrich Thomsen, Asier Newman
Director: Sean Ellis
Reviews for The Broken
Occasionally scary, often laughably portentous, never explained.
02/05/09
An extremely stylish, emotionally aloof film that lacks a strong enough story to create a great horror yarn.
02/05/09
Part mystery, part horror, it keeps us wondering what the hell is going on, while the sombre lensing ups the air of menace. The silly finale undoes a lot of the fine work, though.
01/30/09
Writer-director Sean Ellis is influenced by M. Night Shyamalan, and manages an approximation of both Shyamalan’s habitual look and whispery melodramatics.
01/30/09
Top CriticFleeting pleasures are undermined by an inane, directionless narrative, barely-even-one-dimensional characters and an overall sense of superficiality.
01/30/09
Top CriticThis chilling moodpiece is both psychological thriller and ghost story, with each holding up a mirror to how the other half lives.
01/30/09
Top CriticThe tedium is almost as annoying as the sound effects.
01/30/09
Top CriticThe Brøken is interesting and confident in some ways, though laden down with unfinished moods, images, ideas - and a few scary-movie cliches. It looks like a short film pumped up to feature length.
01/30/09
Top CriticPompous and dour attempt at a psychological horror movie.
01/30/09
Top CriticWith a nod and a wink to Edgar Allan Poe and Hitchcock he has created a slick, supernatural thriller set in a cold and disquietingly quiet contemporary London.
01/30/09
A slick if derivative concept is well served by cold, grey cinematography and a chilling sense of shadowy menace.
01/30/09
A cerebral horror that’s more creepily unsettling than out-and-out scary.
01/30/09
Mr Ellis has some visual flair. He builds up a menacing atmosphere, and there are a few nasty shocks. However, he seems to have no sense at all of pace or humour. His screenplay is terrible.
01/30/09
This stylishly-shot psycho-thriller from Sean Ellis is a creditable stab at the horror genre, but it lacks pace and plot. There's not enough blood 'n' gore for horror fans, while thriller admirers may find it too slow.
01/30/09
This is hardly a horror classic because it takes so damn long for anything to happen. And when it does, the ideas aren’t built upon, leaving you with the feeling the script is two or three rewrites away from a final draft.
01/30/09
The Sneak was left wishing another film would break through the screen.
01/30/09
A Babel cast in a piece of free-associative gothic babble.
01/30/09
This unbelievably ponderous British chiller keeps priming us for some shocking revelations – oodles of "scary" incidental music, ominous shots of the London skyline – and signally fails to deliver them.
01/30/09
Here is a film from a director with a little more imagination and skill than story-telling sense.
01/30/09
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