In the past I’ve been rather less than flattering about the work of director Adam Mason. His debut feature, The 13th Sign (2000) was tedious beyond belief and Dust (2001) was one of only two films ever to actually give me a headache (the other being Michael Bey’s Armageddon (1998), a film I’ve still been able to force myself to watch again). However, a couple of years ago, there were signs that things were picking up in the Mason camp – the short Prey (2003) was unexpectedly excellent, and things were looking good for the future.
Then came Broken (2006) and it’s time for a three course slap-up meal of humble pie here at EOFFTV Towers. Brutal, shocking and at times genuinely edge-of-the-seat suspenseful, it’s a quantum leap forward for Mason and goes a very long way to erasing the sour memories of those earlier films.
Owing an inevitable debt to Saw (2004), Broken opens with an excellent set piece that it takes a little while to recover from – it’s a cleverly disorientating opening that eschews any wasteful scene setting and gets straight to the very grisly point. The immediate aftermath fills in the back story and boasts the best performance to date from Mason’s wife, business partner and resident leading lady Nadja Brand as the resourceful victim who refuses to give in to the inevitable. It’s a more sympathetic character than we’ve seen her play before and she carries it off very well indeed – the film would have crashed and burned if she’d not been able to elicit our sympathies, something she does effortlessly. Eric Colvin is also excellent as the unfathomable madman who enslaves, tortures and humiliates her. He fleshes out his character well, though we know nothing about him even by the end of the film – by not explaining his roots, his background or even his motivation he comes across as an enigmatic and genuinely unsettling character, given eerie life by Colvin’s dark, baleful and frequently quite manic stare.
The film is tent-poled by major gore set pieces, but much of the violence in Broken is psychological and only works thanks to the strength of the two central performances. And although more hardcore gore fans will be disappointed by the sudden staunching of the flow of the red stuff after the galvanising opening, the film is all the more disturbing and affecting for Mason and co-writer and director Simon Boyes’ decision to take the film down the route they do. Having established that The Man (he’s not referred to as anything else either in the film or the credits) is capable of the most appallingly sadistic acts of violence, there’s a constant, nagging expectation that he’ll stop his equally callous mind games at any moment and turn nasty again. This gives the film a tension that was missing from Mason’s earlier work.
The budget was so small that the film is largely confined to a single outdoor location, but Mason and Boyes use this to their advantage, establishing the sense of utter isolation and hopelessness in which leading character – the ironically named Hope – finds herself. Horror usually plays for claustrophobia, but here Mason and Boyes manage to capture some of the elusive creepiness of the British countryside, the sense that behind the romantic rural idyll there’s something very primal and nasty waiting for you…
The film looks magnificent – the photography by Erik Wilson is stunning, generating an atmosphere of dread and impending menace that quite belies the film’s minuscule budget (said to be less than £10,000). Shot-on-video low-budgeters can often look flat and drab, but not Broken – Wilson’s moody lighting gives it a depth and clarity too often missing in such enterprises. Kudos too to Gavin Millar, Emma Holland and Mortiis for their restrained, chilly score.
Relentless, utterly unconcerned for its audience’s sensibilities, brutal and often frankly shocking, Broken is a welcome addition to the post-millennial revival of the British horror film, and a worthy addition to the cycle of “survival horror” films that have been popular in recent years.
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