Day 5: The Broken (2007)

Can a once-prolific blogger who hasn't written 31 posts all year find it in his soul to review 31 previously unseen horror films in 31 days of October? Let's find out...

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Another indie gem(?) from the After Dark Horrorfest/8 Films to Die For series available on Amazon Prime. I'm not gonna lie, I've got high hopes for this one. Mostly built on the stellar cast which includes Lena Headey, Richard Jenkins and Lobo Chan. OK, I have no idea who Lobo Chan is. I just love the name. If I ever have a kid, I'm naming him or her Lobo Chan. He or she would become an MMA champion or an assassin or a celebrity chef with a handle like that. Or maybe they would become an opera singer.

The film begins with a bit of complicated exposition. The very British Lena Headey and her equally British brother plan a surprise birthday party for their very American father. I guess Richard Jenkins couldn't do a British accent, but the filmmakers REALLY wanted him in their film. So they give him a job at the American Embassy in London. Seems...complicated. Did his children spend their entire lives in London with him? I guess. Let's just accept it and move on.

Soon after the party, Headey sees her exact double on the streets of London. She follows her, and sees she drives the same car and has photos of her and her father in her flat. How very British of me to use the word "flat" instead of apartment, yes? This, not surprisingly, unsettles her to the very nth degree, and she gets into a horrible car accident right afterward. Well, it looked horrible. Head-on collision. But she's out of the hospital with minor injuries after only a day. With some memory issues of what happened prior to the crash. Handy.

It turns out that she isn't the only one experiencing double-mint weirdness. Her entire family and some neighbors (Lobo Chan!) are as well. Duplicates or clones or snatched bodies or Evil Spocks are everywhere! And it's all to do with the fucking mirrors. Mirrors! Get it?


Here's something that really annoyed me with the film. The score included these terrifically loud crescendos that would build and build leading to...nothing. Well, later on in the film they did. But for the first act of the film they didn't, and it was really annoying. I kept lowering the volume after or during them, and then found myself raising it again for the next scene to hear the dialogue. Mickey Mousing of the very worst kind. I'm deducting a full pumpkin from my rating for this crap.

But if living in a world with two Lena Headeys is wrong, then I don't wanna be right. So that right there is worthy of one additional pumpkin on it's own. It all evens out in the end.

Turns out I didn't love it like I was hoping, but I didn't hate it either. It was well-acted and well-paced with a halfway decent twisteroo. Nothing groundbreaking, just generally decent.

Verdant Dude rating: 2.5 out of 5 pumpkins.