Photo Courtesy Sundance Film Festival

For all its captivating visual style, cinematographer Angus Hudson framing London landscapes in romantic, gray vistas and editor Scott Thomas manipulating time to accord perfect beats of suspense, Sean Ellis' The Broken lacks its promised thoughtful and shocking substance. More clever horror film homage than original art in its own right, story opens on seemingly idyllic family the McVeys who, during a dinner filled with warm and at times humorously risqué conversation, witness the dining room mirror shatter for no apparent reason, a minor happening that spirals into a bout of crazy in coming scenes.

Quintessentially innocent, hardworking radiologist Gina McVey (Lena Headey) notices the aberration first. As she readies to leave the hospital, she spots a doppelgänger, a woman she immediately trails. Breaking into the look-a-like's apartment, Gina finds a photograph of herself with her father. A cut to black fades back in with Gina in a car, and as she glances back nervously behind her, losing her concentration on the road, she smashes head on into a taxi.

Story from here follows Gina as she attempts to recover her memories prior to the accident. Loving boyfriend Stefan Chambers (Melvil Poupaud) all the sudden seems strange to her, his demeanor more detached and eerie than is natural. Investigations into his character begin to make Gina question the lines between her dreams and reality, and as she progressively verifies her fears, she discovers that her family one-by-one is being killed off and replaced by spiritually debase doppelgängers from a world of reflections. A quick perspective from behind a mirror is easily the most disturbing shot of Ellis' film.

Increasingly as circumstances come to a head, Gina reaching out to save her father (Richard Jenkins), brother (Asier Newman) and sister-in-law (Michelle Duncan), she regains all her memories, Headey playing these difficult moments with genreless focus and honesty. Supporting cast, Newman particularly, buoy up moments of cinematic nod that in lesser hands would play as laughable knock-off. Ending leaves much in the way of story innovation to be desired, having that is merely a hackneyed existentialist twist for its curtain call.

Eminently rentable, The Broken is a wasted theater see but a slightly amusing way to pass 88 minutes on the comfort of a couch, with a bowl of homemade popcorn near at hand.

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