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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
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.
A Babel cast in a piece of free-associative gothic babble.
This chilling moodpiece is both psychological thriller and ghost story, with each holding up a mirror to how the other half lives.
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.
Top CriticThe tedium is almost as annoying as the sound effects.
Top CriticThe Broken isn’t a bad horror film. It’s just not a film—it’s scary footage that serves no purpose.
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.
A slick if derivative concept is well served by cold, grey cinematography and a chilling sense of shadowy menace.
Occasionally scary, often laughably portentous, never explained.
Fleeting pleasures are undermined by an inane, directionless narrative, barely-even-one-dimensional characters and an overall sense of superficiality.
Top CriticAn extremely stylish, emotionally aloof film that lacks a strong enough story to create a great horror yarn.
Here is a film from a director with a little more imagination and skill than story-telling sense.
Writer-director Sean Ellis is influenced by M. Night Shyamalan, and manages an approximation of both Shyamalan’s habitual look and whispery melodramatics.
Top CriticWhy the evil-doers need to do what they do is never explained. All we get is an atmospheric soundtrack desperately seeking a horror movie.
A slick but unscary spine-chiller.
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.
Pompous and dour attempt at a psychological horror movie.
Top CriticPart 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.
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.
This is very much a case of style over substance, but the atmospheric camerawork never really compensates for the subdued performances and a derivative, increasingly ridiculous plot.
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