text: Have you ever had a cool image in your mind that you thought it would be nice to be in a movie: Like seeing a detective peeking through the cracks of a broken fence of some abandoned house? Or seeing a woman walking down a street looking cold and intense and awfully alert? Yeah. Imagine stretching that image to a whole movie, you pretty much got the idea of Broken, though there's no detectives in this movie, I'm just using it as a visual example. But, the intense looking woman is here and she filled pretty much 99% of the screen time. I got nothing to complain about that woman, she's a perfect choice for this role.<br /><br />I consider myself a very open minded individual who can find enjoyment out of all kinds of artistic expressions and I can truly enjoy some really moody stuff. It would be really cool if I can frame one of the scene from this movie and hang it on the wall. Let's be honest here, the acting is superb. Some of the expressions on the actors face are what keep me watching.<br /><br />Now onto the problem of this movie. Beyond the mood, there's not much anything else here. The director basically took an obsession of an idea and ran it far beyond what it was worth. I don't consider it to be a spoiler if I say the obsession is "mirror". Let's face it, this singular idea is all over the bloody place and that's all the director got to work with. Granted, there are a few twist and turn here and there. If you paid any attention, nothing is going to surprise you in the end, obvious plot holes aside.<br /><br />Now, I'm not picking bones with this style of art since I enjoyed them most of the time. I still believe that we should judge an art base on the medium it uses to express whatever the artists want to express. Movie is not a piece of music, or a picture, or a painting, or even a poem, and certainly not just a cool image in your mind. It's all that plus a good story and character development. I consider the Lynch style of movie making cheating. It is irresponsible and cheap and a waste of the medium. We gave movies 2 hours running film time for a good reason. Therefore, we should judge it differently than judging a single frame of imagery such as a photograph or a painting.<br /><br />This movie is not completely Lynch style, thank goodness. It has a linear development and eventually came to a conclusion. It does not have much story or character development. It presented itself rather seriously with characters composed of common folks, thus distance itself from other fantasy stuff at least from the surface. It does not offer any explanation of the fantasy element nor did it ever attempt to build a coherent world around it. The oddity came from nowhere and seems rather isolated and accidental. Maybe the coherency remains in director's head but from what I can see he did not put much effort into realizing it on the screen.<br /><br />Where did he put his effort in then? It seems that he spent a lot of effort in building the mood and enhancing it with the music. The music often built up tension which eventually turn into a tease. Only in the later part of the movie the scare and tension materialized.<br /><br />In the end, I felt like: OK, I know what you are trying to say here but is that the point you are trying to make by spending two hours building up all these tension? It is rather irrelevant with who the characters are and what kind of life they have. And we are given very little about who the characters are. All we have is this circumstance that just took placed. Disappointing but I guess the director did not have much material to work with and it shows.