In Netflix’s Fractured movie, a man is forced into a nightmare situation when his family goes missing at a hospital. Directed by Brad Anderson (The Machinist), Ray Monroe’s (Sam Worthington) journey to find his wife and daughter after they mysteriously disappear is delivered in an unsettling fashion as the truth slowly comes to light. It starts when, on the way home from a tumultuous Thanksgiving with his in-laws, Ray, his wife Joanne (Lily Rabe), and daughter Peri (Lucy Capri) stop by a gas station.

While there, Ray and Peri fall into a pit, leaving Peri with a fractured arm. As frustration turns to worried exacerbation, the parents take their daughter to a nearby hospital, where, after some slightly odd questioning by staff, Peri is eventually seen, and Ray pᴀsses out in the waiting room. When he wakes up, however, he finds himself in a confusing situation. Nobody in the hospital can recall his wife and daughter, only treating him for a small head injury. Determined to get his family back, Ray goes down a paranoid rabbit hole.

What Happens in Fractured’s Ending

Ray Has A PsycH๏τic Break When Authorities Learn The Truth

After Ray manages to break free from from hospital security in Fractured, the personnel bring in Dr. Jacobs (Adjoa Andoh) 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 ago that claimed the life of his first wife. Dr. Jacobs 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 they come to the conclusion that Ray accidentally killed his spouse and child and is having a severe psycH๏τic break to process it all.

Ray, however, doubles down on his perspective, firm in the belief that something nefarious is happening at the hospital. He sneaks into the basement, kills a security guard in the process, and finds an organ-harvesting operation. He manages to interject and breaks his family 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 Ray’s just broken out some poor person still knocked out from the anesthetic.

The fall Ray took with Peri 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 Wife & Daughter Are ᴅᴇᴀᴅ

He Accidentally Killed Them & Put Them In His Car Trunk

A key early moment in Fractured comes when Ray, having fallen 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 ᴅᴇᴀᴅ, and Joanne was distraught. Ray had had enough of her, so he shoved her to the side, where her head landed right on an outward-facing nail amid the debris of construction.

What happens next is the big Fractured twist: having reached his limit, Ray compartmentalizes, puts the bodies in the trunk of his car, and drives to a hospital to get his head looked at. While doing this, he imagines he and Joanne are getting treatment for Peri. Ray pᴀsses out, and when he wakes up, he’s back in the real world, where the bodies are in his trunk, and he comes in to get a few sтιтches in his head. But he maintains his memories of the imagined version, creating chaos in the belief there’s some conspiracy against him.

Ray Is Completely Mentally Broken By The End

Ray Has No Concept Of Reality As He Leaves Hospital

As the truth closes in, Ray becomes more and more irrational in order to maintain his version where Joanne and Peri are still alive. He steals weapons, fakes idenтιтies, and murders a police officer. What started as a heinous crime becomes unimaginably worse the more Ray carries on.

After eight years of carrying around the pain of watching his first wife die, Ray can’t take anymore and decides the world must change when he’s faced with yet another 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 people need to be mindful of trauma and to seek help when faced with horrendous tragedy.

The Real Meaning Of The Fractured Ending

Ray Is Incapable Of Processing His Grief

There was one final sH๏τ in the movie that Brad Anderson said he added to emphasize that Ray might be about to realize everything he’s done and return to reality. If this happens, the ending could be even more tragic than anyone could have suspected. That scene had Ray’s grin as he imagined he was singing with his family suddenly turning into a grimace. It is as if he might have realized something wasn’t right. Anderson explains this last sH๏τ (via Fresh Fiction).

“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.’ But then we kept it rolling, and in the last frames, you start to see his face fall, like it just dawned on him.”

In the movie itself, up until that final moment, it seems that Ray is living in his own delusions. When the police finally catch up to him and arrest him, he will likely end up in a psychiatric hospital as doctors try to help him regain his grip on reality. He killed a police officer, so his wife and daughter’s deaths are the least of his worries. The ending shows that he is a broken man. However, that last sH๏τ in Fractured suggests that he might be snapping back into reality, and his horrors are just beginning.

How The Fractured Ending Was Received

The Final Moments Were All-Too-Familiar For Most Viewers

The critical and audience responses to 2019’s Fractured were divided, with just as many praising the psychological thriller as there were thsoe who felt it was underwhelming. This is perfectly illustrated by its score on Rotten Tomatoes, with the film clocking in at 56% on the Tomatometer (critic score) and 53% on the Popcornmeter (audience score). However, the reason that some found Fractured to be a less-than thrilling viewing experience wasn’t the fault of the ending – or, at least, it wasn’t because the ending was seen as poorly executed.

The key issue that many critics and viewers had with Fractured was that it, at best, lacked any innovation and, at worst, was seen as derivative. Even the positive and even-handed reviews of Fractured couldn’t shy away from the fact that director Brad Anderson’s Netflix movie didn’t really deliver anything that hadn’t been seen before. For example, the 3-star review of The Guardian critic Benjamin Lee offers this fairly balanced appraisal of Fractured and its finale:

“It never feels like much of a stretch for [director Brad Anderson] but it’s also never less than watchable thanks to some unexpected directorial choices and a curious, compelling mystery at its centre. Given the familiar territory, it’s less a question of “Where will this go?” and more of “Which similarly plotted film’s twist ending will it most closely resemble?”, a less surprising game but a fun one nonetheless.”

However, other critics were less forgiving in their take on the ending of Fractured and the predictable plot that leads to it. Writing for Roger Ebert, Brian Tallerico is scathing in his response to the ending of Fractured. While many critics acknowledged that Fractured did handle its by-the-numbers twists and turns well, Tallerico met them with a strong and palpable anger:

“I was excited at the prospect of a filmmaker I admire playing with a classic mystery/thriller structure in the Netflix Original “Fractured,” released today. That excitement quickly turned to boredom and then outright anger at a twist that really thinks you’re an idiot. This atrocious movie never makes a lick of sense, wearing its “message” on its sleeve like a bad term paper, and then ending in a way that should make you angry more than eager to see if it makes any sense.”

Overall, it seems that the ending of Fractured was seen as a well executed rehash of many similar psychological thrillers. While it wasn’t done sloppily, it did play things too close to its inspirations for the majority of critics and audience members. Fractured could have been much better than it was, and the unsatisfactory finale was a key contributor to the underwhelming viewing experience.