In Netlix's new movie Fractured, a man is forced into a nightmare situation when his family goes missing at a hospital - and you probably won't see the twist ending coming. Directed by Brad Anderson, of 2004's The Machinist fame, Ray Monroe's journey to find his wife and daughter after they mysteriously disappear is delivered in unsettling fashion as the truth slowly comes to light.
On the way home from a less than fruitful family thanksgiving with the in-laws, Ray (Sam Worthington), his wife Joanne (Lily Rabe), and daughter Peri (Lucy Capri) stop by a gas station. While there, Ray and Peri take a fall, leaving Peri with a fractured arm. As frustration turns to worried exacerbation, the parents take their girl to a nearby hospital, where, after some slightly odd questioning by staff, Peri is eventually seen and Ray passes out in the waiting room.
When he wakes up, however, he finds himself in what feels like an alternate reality. Nobody in the hospital can recall his wife and daughter, only treating him for a small head injury. Determined to get his fmaily back, Ray starts down a paranoid rabbit hole that ultimately leads him to some dark revelations about himself.
What Happens in Fractured's Ending
After Ray manages to break free from from hospital security in Fractured, the personnel bring in a psychiatric doctor to help calm him down and get to the bottom of what happened. Ray had alerted nearby police, and had the doctor that admitted his daughter for a CAT scan called in, as nobody currently on duty could remember him or find his or his family's names on record.
The psychiatrist manages to make some breakthroughs in Ray's psyche, discovering that he's been carrying trauma from a car crash eight years previous that claimed the life of his first wife. She convinces him to lead her and the officials on his case back to the gas station where the incident took place. There, they discover a bloodstain from the fall Peri took on a patch of construction work, and come to the conclusion that Ray accidentally killed his spouse and child and is having a severe psychotic break to process it all.
Ray, however, doubles down on his own perspective, firm in the belief that something nefarious is going on in the bowels of that hospital. He manages to sneak into the basement, killing a security guard in the process, and finds an organ harvesting operation happening. He manages to interject before his family are chopped up and break them out. As the sun begins to rise, Ray starts singing with his family in the backseat as the camera fades to the truth: the area he was in was an operating theater, and he's just broken out some poor person still knocked out from the anesthetic.
The fall Ray took with Peri had killed her, and he accidentally killed his wife by pushing her head onto a nail. Their bodies were in the trunk of his car, where he'd left them. Fractured ends with Ray driving off, likely to soon be arrested, in full psychosis that he'd finally managed to do something right as a father and husband.
Ray's Family Are Dead, And He Killed Them
A key early moment in Fractured comes when Ray, having fallen down after Peri, blacks out from a blow to the head. This is where reality gives way to Ray's warped point-of-view. In all the exhaustion from arguing with Joanne, and now this, where his failures seemed perpetual and unending, he snaps. Peri was dead, and Joanne was upset, and Ray had had enough of her, so he shoves her to the side, where her head lands right on an outward facing nail amid the debris of construction.
What happens next is the big twist: having absolutely reached his limit, Ray compartmentalizes, puts the bodies in the boot of his car and drives to a hospital to get his head looked at. While doing this, though, he imagines that he and Joanne are actually getting treatment for Peri. Then he passes out from all the exertion, and when he wakes up, he's back in the real world, where those bodies are in his trunk and he came in to get a few stitches in his head. But he maintains his memories of the imagined version, creating all sorts of chaos in the belief there's some conspiracy against him.
Ray Is Completely Mentally Broken By The End
As the truth closes in, Ray becomes more and more irrational to keep his version where Joanne and Peri are alive. He steals weapons, fakes identities and murders a policeman. What started as a heinous crime becomes unimaginably worse the more Ray carries on.
After carrying around the pain of watching his first wife die for eight years, Ray simply can't take any more and decides the world must change when he's faced with yet more tragedy. When he finally manages to get back in his car with his family in the backseat, he's in full belief that he's done the right thing, and starts singing with his now imaginary family. Ray's story in Fractured is a grim, harrowing reminder that we need to be mindful of trauma and to seek help when faced with horrendous tragedy, lest we become disjointed from everything around us.