Netflix's Fractured director explains final shot
Note: This article contains Fractured spoilers... naturally.
Now streaming on Netflix, director Brad Anderson's latest chiller Fractured has left us all with plenty of questions after that final shot.
Starring Avatar's Sam Worthington and American Horror Story's Lily Rabe, this mystery movie takes its cues from the likes of Shutter Island and Memento (although ultimately it does make the 100-minute duration feel a little "tedious").
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In conversation with Fresh Fiction, Anderson was asked how important it was to end on an ambiguous note.
"Yeah. The last frame of the movie is a close-up of Ray's face after he's just sung a song to his child in the backseat and his wife. It's a sense of accomplishment and being a hero. 'I did it! I saved them from the bad guys at the hospital.'"
Anderson continued: "But then we kept it rolling, and in the last frames, you start to see his face fall, like it just dawned on him. That wasn't in the script. In the script, it ends with, 'Ray drives off into the sunset with his family.' But I wanted to add a little of ambiguity for his character."
The director (who also made the creepy Christian Bale thriller The Machinist) then discussed how different outlooks will generate different opinions on the ending.
"I wonder if he will wake up to the truth or not," he said. "That's the question at the end of the movie. Depending on how bleak of an outlook you have on things, you can say better that he live in self-delusion, which is better than him living in reality.
"We all do that to a certain degree in our lives. We don't want to face harsh realities. We just want to gloss them over and put them aside. Maybe there's a little bit of that going on here. I find the ending to be sad and tragic, but it's also poignant, too."
Fractured is available on Netflix.
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