I Got (Legally) Very High And Tried To Figure Out What Was Happening In ‘Fractured’

Contributor: Stephanie Anderson

Hello! My name is Stephanie, and I’ve been dealing with chronic pain, depression and anxiety for the last nine years. At the moment, I’m taking 15 various pills a day to keep it under control, and guess what? I’m still in pain everyday! Hate that for me!

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To manage my pain, I rotate a number of painkillers, one of which is a CBD oil with a 1:1 ratio of CBD to THC (more on that here). Like all painkillers, it mostly just makes the pain more tolerable, rather than actually taking the pain away, but you know what’s better than being in pain? Being high, but also in pain. Legally, though!!!

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bx6NdmWjy3m/

Anyway, the other week I was in a pain flare, high, and decided to watch Netflix’s new thriller, Fractured.

Around 18 minutes in, for no particular reason other than my own desire to figure it out, I began jotting down all my thoughts about what was going on as I climbed further and further inside of the film, pausing it every other minute so I didn’t miss anything while taking my meticulous notes.

Was that a complete waste of my time? Who can say?! (Spoilers: it was.)

Reading my notes back, I’m not entirely sure that I actually understand what happened in this film, and TBH I’m not going to rewatch it sober to figure it out, because at three different points in this film I wrote: “lmao I think this movie is very bad????” or words to that effect. Nevertheless, here are some of the theories my poor, high AF brain came up with.

1. Is Sam Worthington In A Coma Y/N?

For the vast majority of this film, I was absolutely convinced that Sam Worthington’s character was in a coma and that at some point he was going to wake up in the hospital and find out that his kid was dead after they had both fallen directly onto concrete.

I cited the very stilted dialogue with his wife and also the people at the hospital as proof of this, writing: “and he walks weird and the nurse wouldn’t ignore someone with a bleeding headache wound. Or I mean, it’s America so maybe they would,” and then I laughed about that joke for far too long.

Upon seeing the shot of the crumpled ‘get well soon’ balloon, I stopped to wonder whether there was ALSO a supernatural element to the film, and then asked myself: “or is that just what they want me to think until the end with the reveal that he’s been in a coma the whole time or whatever.” Did he sign himself in because he’s crazy or did he hit his head in the crash and then this is a coma. They want me to believe A but I think it’s B.

2. What’s Going On With The Organ Harvesting?

There was a shot that lingered on an ambulance where our hero saw them sign off on a box with organs in it, and because I thought the kid was already dead, I wrote “wait like they harvested her organs on the spot??? Lmao”. I was convinced that he — in his coma — was seeing the arrival of THEIR OWN ambulance, with the body of his daughter inside. Also the mother and daughter are taken downstairs in the elevator, notoriously a location for morgues, rather than scans. I laughed very smugly to myself when I noticed this very obvious, lingering shot.

There’s a whole lot of organ harvesting stuff going on in this film and even now thinking back on it I’m not sure I really… got it. Like he gets all twitchy at one point overhearing a doctor talk about an appendectomy, which comes into play again later in the film, but it’s like… literally an appendix would be THE MOST useless thing to illegally harvest from someone’s body?! As a side note: having my appendix out is actually what triggered my chronic pain, but I’ve never… considered buying a replacement on the black market, because you don’t need one!!! WHY WOULD THEY BE HARVESTING USELESS ORGANS YOU DON’T NEED???

From here, my theory was that Sam Worthington’s character was “doing this whole personal Charles Dickens Christmas Carol thing” because he was fixing all his relationships in his subconscious, and there was a reveal that he was a recovering alcoholic with a dead wife whose death he was obviously responsible for. From there, he was going to go Save! The! Day!!! and find his wife and daughter in the morgue, saving their lives, only to wake up and discover that his daughter was really dead. This isn’t what happened but as I wrote at another point: “ugh I think I’m giving this film too much credit”.

3. The Bit Where I Got Too High

Around two thirds of the way through the film, I think I was perhaps… too high, because I really couldn’t figure out what parts were referencing the first crash with his dead wife, and the servo fall that kicked everything off. This led to quite a bit of self-inflicted confusion as I tried to wade through the mess that I had created by being absolutely, 1000% convinced that the entire plot was a coma (spoilers, it was not). At one point I wrote: “Omg imagine not understanding this is a coma,” that’s how convinced I was.

“How can she go splat at the station if they had already crashed???”

As it went on, I grew exhausted by what I believed was this man’s subconscious as he tried to make up for the guilt of killing his first wife by taking on an entire staff of crooked, organ harvesting hospital workers in order to save the day, and I just wanted to get to the reveal and prove myself right.

“This guy’s subconscious is wild,” I wrote. “He’s like a hero who tries hard and WINS lmao, good for him though, I couldn’t even get Luke from Survivor to cheat on his wife with me in MY OWN DREAM, meanwhile he’s just taken an entire hospital and police staff hostage.”

“Just cum already my man, save the day so we can find out you killed them or whatever,” I continued. “Win the big fight and go find us some corpses sis!”

By the time he got his ass down to the morgue to discover his wife and child, I was very over it.

“Lmao yeah sis!!! Human organs!!! We been knew!!! Go save the day my man!!!” I wrote, and after he did, I was very excited to be proven right.

“LMAOOOO OMFG HE SAVED THE DAY THIS IS SO FUNNY, LET’S DO THE REVEAL!”

4. The Reveal

And then, it happened! The reveal that was “DIFFERENT THAN I EXPECTED!”

By the time it was revealed that he accidentally killed them both at the service station, I was truly too high to cope with it or take any coherent notes, so I will leave you with my final notes:

“Wait okay
So he killed them both at the servo
He has anger issues lol
Created a fake reality there not in the car?
You wouldn’t create a reality where you kill your wife
So the car crash was just the last wife

Was that good or bad
I think bad?????
He killed them at the servo and bc he killed his last family as well, yeah, their bodies were taken to the morgue, he’d seen the psych for his head injury??? Were they

What????”

Stephanie Anderson is a freelance writer who writes and tweets only about pain and pop culture. You can explain what Fractured was about to her here.

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