Fractured 2020

Ray is driving home with his wife, Joanne, and their daughter, Peri, after a Thanksgiving visit, and the car is filled with a tense undercurrent about their strained relationship. A routine stop at a gas station for a bathroom break quickly spirals into a life-changing ordeal. When Peri misplaces her compact mirror, Joanne heads to the restroom while Ray searches the back seat. A stray dog nearby and Peri’s uneasy movements push her toward an exposed pit, and a rock thrown to scare the animal inadvertently sends Peri plummeting into the hole. Ray dives after her, striking his head in the fall, and when he regains consciousness, a distressed Joanne has climbed down to tend to Peri’s injuries.

With Peri hurt but alive, the family decides to head to a nearby hospital to get her arm checked and to rule out any head injury with a CAT scan. As Peri is prepped for imaging, the adults must confront more practical concerns: at the admissions desk, they’re asked whether they would be willing for Peri to be placed on the organ donor register if a grave outcome looms. A doctor assesses the arm and orders the scan, and Joanne accompanies Peri to the basement scanning facility while Ray dozes in the waiting area.

Ray awakens hours later to a troubling realization: neither his wife nor daughter is in the hospital, and staff insist they have no record of them. Most doctors have shifted, and the single nurse on duty repeats that Ray arrived alone and has been treated for a head wound. Distraught and disoriented, Ray is restrained by security and given a sedative before being locked in a room. He manages to escape and flags down two police officers, who begin a cautious investigation.

Evidence starts to mount that his family never checked into the hospital, and Ray is transported back to the gas station where a bloody scene awaits. He seizes an officer’s gun and locks the officers inside the gas station before returning to the hospital to confront the basement where Peri is allegedly to undergo organ harvesting. He disrupts the procedure, dragging Peri out along with a drugged Joanne, and fires at a doctor as the trio flees the building.

As they drive away, the grisly truth surfaces: Peri and Joanne have died—Peri from the fall, Joanne killed after being pushed onto a spike by Ray—and their bodies have been hidden in the back of the car all along. The hospital sequence and the surrounding chaos had been the product of Ray’s psyche, a desperate attempt to deny and process the catastrophic reality. Lurking unseen on the back seat is a seriously ill patient who Ray had extracted from surgery, now unconscious as the night unfolds.