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(More customer reviews)I was watching the previews on the DVD for "Black Sheep" when the trailer for "Broken" came on. In that week's rentals I had a film called "Broken," but it was an Indie film starring Heather Graham and Jeremy Sisto and not this film, which turns out to be another example of the torture porn horror film, albeit with pretensions. What is interesting is that that both "Broken" films came out in 2006 and that apparently both have just been released on DVD in the past month. This brings to mind the possibility that somebody would recommend the Heather Graham "Broken" and rent this one by mistake (Don't laugh, I recommended the Academy Award winning "American Beauty" to a co-worker once and they went to the video store and picked up "American Pie" and could not figure out why anybody would give Jason Biggs and the gang the Oscar). But the thought of people watching the wrong "Broken" was enough to make me check the other one out to see how much damage could be done to the psyche of some unsuspecting soul.
At the start of the film a title card informs us that "The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of fear." The quote is from Harriet A. Jacobs (1813-1897), an American abolitionist who wrote the 1861 book "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." Written and directed by the tag team of Simon Boyes and Adam Mason, this movie is about Hope (Nadja Brand), a woman who puts her young daughter to bed one night and wakes up trapped in a coffin-like box. We know from the opening scene of the film that whatever is about to happen to Hope has happened to another woman, who clearly has been pushed beyond her limits. Consequently, given the Jacobs quote the implication is that the title of this horror film has to do with a woman's broken spirit. However, in the final analysis most of what gets broken here is physical rather than spiritual.
Hope is being held in the forest by a man (Eric Colvin), whose goal in dragging women out there is not to torture, rape, and kill them, but to help them get their minds right to being his domestic slave (unless the tending the garden bit is supposed to reference "Candide" in some way I have not yet figured out). So when his victims are required to use a pointed stick to open up an incision in their abdomens while bound by the neck to a tree while balanced on a perch nailed several feet off the ground, it might involve blood (and sometimes guts), but it is not torture but a test. One of several as the man attempts to break Hope. But unlike previous victims, who have not worked out as the man has intended, Hope has something to hang on to: the possibility that her daughter is still alive.
This is a low budget film and if you go through the DVD's special features you will find out that Boyes and Mason came up with the script as something that they could afford to film: if you shoot in the forest you do not have to worry about building sets and if one of you is married (at the time) to the lead actress that explains how you get somebody to make a movie like this when you are shooting outdoors in England during the winter. If the movie delivered more of what it promised, it would have gone over better with me, especially given that opening quote which put me in a particular frame of mind. "Broken" is different from most splatter flicks in that it takes place over several weeks, which is appropriate to the psychological dimension. Just do not expect to understand how this nut gets his victims out there in the first place, because that is not part of the game here.
For all of its shortcomings, the end game of "Broken" is probably the best part of the movie. What happens to Hope and the man, respectively, struck me as being different and quite possibly original for this type of genre, and I ended up rounding up on the movie because of that (usually the ending of a splatter flick is the weakest part, especially when they contrive some stupid way for the killer to get killed). There are other decent parts of the film as well: the parts that are suppose to revulse you in this movie do so, the cinematography does not look low-budget, and there were several nice cuts to good effect, so this is not a case of just wallowing in blood and gore. "Broken" is not the torture porn film its trailer makes it out to be, but there is enough here to recommend checking it out.
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Hope and her young daughter are abducted and brought to a remote forest by a mysterious and nameless man. As Hope is forced to undergo a series of humiliating, violent, and degrading trials, she fights desperately to escape and discover the fate of her missing daughter.
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