Sean Ellis’s The Broken was actually made as another horror movie, probably to increase the number of movies in the much-clichéd genre of Hollywood film industry. But, when I went to watch the movie, the first and foremost question came to my mind was, what could be the film’s actual subject matter, if it could incorporate the actual phenomenon? Could that be the quasi-abnormal phenomenon, Doppelganger, or the unusual psychotic disorder, the Capgras Delusion?
Before going into depth, I must first introduce the subject-duo, otherwise, it may seem strange to the readers. Capgras Delusion is not actually a phenomenon, but a psychotic disorder. A quite unusual or more precisely, rare psychological disease, but this can happen to anyone at a given point of time. Capgras Delusion is derived from Schizophrenia, which causes a very much unusual phenomenon. If anyone suffers from this kind of delusional syndrome, he or she may confuse his or her spouse with an imposter. The central character’s trauma in The Broken somehow resembles the disorder.
The Doppelganger phenomenon itself has a German orientation. It is used to describe the sensation of one for having glimpsed oneself in the peripheral vision. It has nothing to do with one’s mirror image. It is something like alternate self. In some tradition, it is the harbinger of death.
The Broken by Sean Ellis was released in 2008. The film, starred by Ulrich Thomsen, Lena Headey, Richard Jenkins, starts with a quote from Edgar Allan Poe, ‘You have conquered, and I yield yet. Henceforward art thou also dead—dead to the world, to heaven, and to hope! In me didst thou exist—and—in my death—see by this image, which is thine own. How utterly thou hast murdered thyself.’ In this film, the bizarre things starts happening with the mirror suddenly breaks down out of nowhere, in the birthday party of John McVey. Everybody gets a bit startled and scared at first, but after a while, they manage to laugh.
After the incident, Dr. Gina McVey, the central character, starts getting confused about her own image. After returning from the birthday party, she gets a hot bath. When she looks at the wet image of herself in the mirror, she gets confused about her own image. And then, the mirror glass breaks down.
Things start getting more topsy-turvy, when, in hospital, the ghostly double of radiologist Gina McVey appears and makes coffee for herself without the knowledge of Gina. Gina feels somebody is passing through the passage, but cannot see her face properly. When Gina sees the coffee cup on the floor, she gets puzzled once again because she did not make coffee. There she meets her fellow radiologist Anthony who asks her, ‘did you forget something? I just saw you leaving to go home.’ Gina answers, ‘No, I was here.’ Anthony then looks more puzzled and says, ‘That’s funny. I could’ve sworn, I saw you leaving the building.’
When Gina McVey goes to call Stephan Martin, her boyfriend, watches with her own eyes her ghostly double is driving her Cherokee Jeep while speaking in a cell phone she gets completely bewildered and follows the double inside Pembridge House. There she finds out her own photograph with her father, John McVey. She completely loses control over herself and blindly follows the double. Thereafter we find her inside the car, driving fanatically, while looking at her own image inside the car-mirror. Lost in deep thought, she crashes her car with another one.
Gina survives the accident, but loses all memories regarding it. She gets a bit disoriented. Some fragments of the memories regarding accident comes and disappears in her mind. Dr. Robert Zachman appears on the scene to get the psychological scar out of her unconscious.
When Gina comes back home with Stephan Martin, she starts getting puzzled about her boyfriend. His behaviour seems strange to her. Her confusion deepens, when the dog bites Stephan. Gina notices a leak upstairs and goes to the lot for fixing it. Stephan catches her there, and he seems to be extremely rude at that time. This is when she seriously begins to doubt him as an imposter. In her imagination, Stephan is superimposed with a violent creature. In her dream, she also begins to see that she is killing herself.
Gina, totally bewildered, goes to Dr. Robert Zachman and says, ‘I don’t think, Stephan is my boyfriend. He looks like him, but he is not him.’ Dr. Zachman appears to be very casual at first and begins to stress on the complexity of love relations, but Gina again repeats firmly, ‘The man in the apartment is not my boyfriend.’
Dr. Zachman gets her words. He clearly explains her; she may be suffering from the Capgras Syndrome. He says, it is a disorder, specially, ‘when people begin to believe, a close acquaintance, generally a family member or a spouse, has been replaced by an identical looking imposter, and the condition in most cases is a direct result of brain lesion.’ In hospital, the brain scan report shows some bruises on the same part of her brain, from where the Capgras Delusion usually occurs.
Doctors say, it is also difficult to diagnose because, the symptoms due to the accident is similar to the mental illness driving from Capgras Delusion. So, doctors get confused, whether the loss of memory and the feeling of disorientation are taking place because of Capgras Delusion or a damaged brain.
Apart from Gina, strange things start happening to other family members too. Her father, John McVey is started being seen by his secretary, Mary, on the street at lunch time. When John is questioned, he replies, he has been inside the office room throughout the day. Mary reacts like Anthony in Gina’s hospital, ‘I could have sworn…’, then keeps the sentence incomplete and goes away for her own work.
Kate, Gina’s sister-in-law, comes back home at evening and begins looking for Daniel, her husband. Failed to get access to him, she calls him at last. We see Daniel inside the studio. He looks strange and stands still, but does not receive the phone. At the same time, a ghostly double of Kate appears in the flat and murders Kate. The scene reminds back the memory of Hitchcock’s Psycho, but the murder takes place without a knife!
At the mean time, the Capgras Delusion seems to gobble John McVey. A puzzled John looks at the photo given to him by Gina, and says, ‘Perhaps, it’s not me.’
When Gina comes back to the apartment to get her things packed, she again tries to find out, what causes the leak and discovers dead Stephan Martin up at the lot. She then was persuaded by the ghostly double of Stephan, (whom she has doubted and doctors diagnosed the syndrome as Capgras Delusion). Gina calls her father, who advises her to stay calm, but just aftermath, he himself is killed by his own ghostly double, whom his secretary Mary has seen on the street. When Gina calls Daniel and tells him that now she remembers fully how the accident has occurred, that she followed a woman to the Pembridge House, who looks exactly like her, Daniel reminds her that Pembridge House is the building where Gina herself lives! Gina rushes to the apartment (her own) and finds out her own ‘dead body’! The ‘fragments’ then become much more clearer and she fully remembers now, how she has murder the ‘woman’ herself, who looks ‘exactly like her’ or the ‘real’ Gina McVey. She by now discovers that she herself is the ‘ghostly double’ of Dr. Gina McVey, the radiologist, whom she had murdered days ago and thereafter she had met with the disastrous accident, just because she was lost in deep thought and was looking at the mirror to see the blood of Gina all over her face.
The rest of the film is as simple as that. Gina’s double meets with the ghostly double of her father and is completely transformed into another human being, a stranger who looks exactly like Gina, whom Daniel scares of, Anthony does not recognize properly. In the whole film, it is Daniel, who is the only surviving original.
The film ends here, left us with some questions that remain unanswered. Are they all, except Daniel, suffering from Capgras Delusion? Or, they have all been murdered by their ghostly doubles or ‘Doppelganger’ in another word, throughout the film? If that so, then the film depicts that the ghostly double or the doppelganger only exists after murdering the original (a myth that other films belong to Doppelganger genre tried to depict too).
Dis Sean Ellis try to give us a message by surviving the doppelgangers that in this world of utter corruption, where man kills man for money, the scenario had been changed? That, today evil prevails over the good?
Who knows?
Suchetana Chakraborty
