Broken (2007)

People are voting emotionally.

Memorable, crazy movie

How sad is this?

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

The central premise has promise: Single mother Hope (a fine and personable performance by Nadja Brand) gets abducted by a cruel and cunning mysterious man (well played with chilling understatement by Eric Colvin) who holds her captive in a remote woodland camp and tortures her in order to bend the poor lass to his merciless will. While writers/directors Adam Mason and Simon Boyes succeed with creating and sustaining an unwaveringly grim and harsh tone as well as make good use of the beautiful, yet desolate and isolated sylvan setting, they crucially fail to generate much in the way of tension and don't develop the character of Hope thoroughly enough for the viewer to have any actual emotional investment in her miserable plight. Granted, the convincing graphic gore and moments of sadistic violence pack a nasty wallop, but the sluggish pacing, talky script, and generally flat execution make this picture a rather tedious chore to sit through. However, the filmmakers still deserve a few extra points for avoiding the usual teens-in-peril formula, an earnest (if inert) attempt at gritty realism, and, most of all, the genuinely startling and unexpected surprise bummer nihilistic ending. It's just that this movie doesn't have the essential punch or vigor it needs to cook the way that it should. Erik Wilson's stark cinematography provides an appropriately dark and gloomy look. The spare rattling score by Emma Holand and Gavin Miller does the flesh-crawling trick. A strictly so-so flick.

This movie begins with a brutal opening scene which sets a very dark and horrifying tone for the rest of the movie. I think what I loved most about Broken was the connection between the victim and villain. I don't want to get too much into the plot but the deeper and unspoken aspect of how the relationship worked between the two seemed so realistic to me that it made it much more real and creepy. This movie made it seem like this situation could happen to just anyone.I loved the main actress and thought she did a wonderful job playing the victim and then adjusting to her surroundings in order to be able to survive. Another thing that made it more realistic was she was just a normal woman. Gone was the Hollywood girls with big hair, short skirts and huge fake boobs. This was your average attractive woman, single mom, lonely and looking for love. She was human… not some airheaded college student who runs upstairs when the door is downstairs. She made this movie seem that much more real to me.I also found the camera work to be dark and despairing. They were outside, yet the atmosphere was dark and gray. It looked cold and everything looked sad and morbid.I truly enjoyed this movie. A very nice surprise for a movie that is super low budget. One thing I would like to add about this movie was that they were comparing it to Saw. I think that this comparison ruined the movie for some folks as they watched it expecting a Saw type thing and ended up watching something completely different, not even comparable. I don't know why they would make that comparison, it only seemed to hurt the reviews.Overall a great film that pulled me in right from the beginning.ZombieSteak.com - Discover a new world of horror films, designed just for you.

Really enjoyed this film, I like the way a lot of people who have given this film bad reviews keep mentioning the utter turd of a film "saw" just shows what sort of moron's they are!, for the budget the film makers here had i think they did a excellent job.A lot of previous reviewers criticize the film as not making sense, being pointless and also criticise the film for not showing how the victims came to be in the woods or what happened to Hope after, clearly these people have no imagination and had better stick to glossy cgi infested shite like saw!, A refreshing change in a generally boring genre!(HORROR).

This could very well be the worst movie ever made. It is beyond me why there are so many people that have positive things to say about this truly awful piece of film.Let's get something straight, I don't think it's "awful" because it's violent. I think it's awful because it was made by a bunch of hacks.Just go up to the actors listed in the film to see what they've done after this movie was made in 2006. It looks like only two have gone on to do other things. That's because the acting in this movie was an abomination. You could use this movie in film class to show young directors how to NOT get good performances out of their actors.First of all, the casting was atrocious. They couldn't find a less threatening guy to play the antagonist then they one in the film. He looked like the small doofus that played the little guy on the chain gang in "Oh Brother Where Art Thou." And we're supposed to believe this guy has been living in the woods when he's wearing clothes that looked like they were freshly bought off the rack from some new Western store. The woman, "Hope," looked like an ugly Baby Spice. Why anyone would want to kidnap her is a mystery. Jeffrey Dahmer took better care in picking victims than the evil guy in this movie.Second of all, the character development was none existent. Let's forgo the third-of-all and fourth-of-all and just rattle some more off here.There were scenes where the captive could easily get the chains off by lifting them over her head. The first scene had a woman go through torture to stay alive only to kill herself when she got through the hard part. The movie took place over a month yet they looked just as clean at the end of the movie than they did at the start of the movie. The school girl victim was the most annoying character ever. I was begging for her to die. The ending was retarded.The movie was typical Euro movie making: Don't explain anything, just film a bunch of stuff and play it off as being artsy.It's like these Japanese horror films. They say they don't like American horror films because we have to explain everything and we have to exact revenge on the antagonist. I say, it's lazy screen writing to not provide back-story and a resolution.Avoid this movie at all cost. If you see it in the store do us all a favor and burn it. No eyes should ever witness the abortion that is Broken. I'd like to spit in the directors' faces for being such hacks and somehow getting a bunch of moronic fans to back their lazy garbage. Go screw.