The Broken (4 Stars)

There was a delay writing this blog post. After watching the film last night I wanted to write a review immediately, while it was still fresh in my mind, but there was no Internet connection. It happens. I waited a bit. I had a cup of coffee. Then I tried again. Still no Internet. Then I realised that the problem was only with me. My phone and my laptop could both access the Wifi. Curiouser and curiouser. It was late, so I went to bed.

This morning (6th October) there was still no Internet, so I tried to diagnose the problem. My Wifi adapter was working. The diagnostics claimed there were proxy problems, whatever that means. I remembered that I did a Windows update last night before the film started, so I restored the state I had before the update. Voilà! Everything worked again.

I've never had problems with Windows updates before. I'm not sure what to do now. Can I flag the update as a bug so that it isn't automatically installed again? I don't want to have to restore my system every week.

You've probably noticed that the date of this post is 5th October. The dates of my posts are always when I watch a film, not when I write the post. At least, that's the case now. When I started writing my blog in 2010, I didn't know I could change a post's date. I didn't have a handbook on how to use the Blogger software, I just learnt as I went along. It wasn't until a few years later that a noticed a "Set date and time" option. It's more useful to me to have the correct date attached to each film. As I've often said, my blog is primarily a film diary, not a film review site. The dates of my early posts are often a day off. But at least the order is correct.

Now to the film itself. "The Broken" was made in 2008, thirteen years ago. I'm surprised that I never discovered it until now. I bought it spontaneously after seeing a trailer on another Blu-ray disc. It's a very good British horror film, and it's refreshingly original. Most American horror films follow standard formulas. You know what I mean: the jump scares, etc. Not that I don't like American horror films, but it's good to see something original once in a while. The opening scenes don't even look like a horror film, but the eerie music tells us what we have to expect.

Gina McVey is a radiologist who lives and works in London. At her father's birthday party a mirror spontaneously breaks. The following day she sees a woman who looks identical to her. She follows her home, and in the woman's apartment she finds photos of herself with her father. She leaves quickly before she's discovered. After this she leaves, but she gets into a car accident. She's admitted to hospital with light injuries and memory loss.

When she leaves hospital strange things are happening. Her boyfriend has changed so drastically that she tells people it's not her boyfriend, it's just someone who looks like him. Other people are also changing. And wherever she goes she finds broken mirrors.

This is a film that I enjoyed so much that I already want to watch it again. It leaves things open. When the film ends, not everything has been explained. Normally I'd call that an error, but in this case it works well. The viewer is left to speculate on what things mean.

Despite being a British film, it hasn't earned a Blu-ray release in Britain. The German Blu-ray release has the original English dialogue. The only thing that's missing is English subtitles. That's a problem with most German releases of English language films. The discs include the original English dialogue, but only German subtitles.

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