A London radiologist confronts her dark side in Sean Ellis' psychological horror. Lena Headey stars
Pedro Almodóvar may have come up with the phrase in his breakout 1988 comedy, but really it is horror a
nd thriller movies that have the best track record for treating women on the verge of a nervous breakdown.Repulsion (1965), Rosemary's Baby (1968), The Others (2001), Dark Water (2002), The Forgotten (2004), Flightplan (2005), The Descent (2005) and Shrooms (2006) all present a neurotic woman's gradual unravelling from the ambiguous vantage point of her own perspective, so that it is not clear (at least until the end) whether the genre thrills that she is experiencing are unfolding in the real world or just in her addled head. Sean Ellis' The Brøken plays a similar game, but with such mastery of the cinematic form, and such a clever interweaving of different narrative types, that its very derivativeness ends up being seen through a glass darkly.
Gina McVey (Lena Headey) successfully divides herself between her loving family and her career as a radiologist, between the apartment being refurbished by her architect boyfriend Stefan (Melvil Poupaud) and her own flat ("a girl's gotta have clean underwear"). One night, though, at a surprise party for her father John (Richard Jenkins) also attended by her artist brother Daniel (Asier Newman), his girlfriend Kate (Michelle Duncan) and Stefan, a large mounted mirror falls and shatters, and with it, Gina's sense of a coherent identity.
