To the audience of The Advocate, actress Lena Headey is perhaps best known for the romantic comedy Imagine Me & You, but she's quickly zoomed to more mainstream notice as the gun-strapped mom at the center of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. In that television show, she hunts down dangerous replicants on a weekly basis -- a talent that would serve Headey well in The Broken, her new Sundance entry directed by Sean Ellis. In the film's eerie, gloomy version of London, Headey plays Gina McVey, whose quietly humming life is jolted when she catches a glimpse of a woman who looks just like her. When Gina follows her doppleganger back to the woman's apartment, a terrible accident occurs which leaves Gina with strange visions -- and a sense that many of her loved ones, including her boyfriend (Time to Leave's Melvil Poupaud), have been replaced by uncanny, sinister doubles.
Ellis's first film was the little-seen Cashback, the story of a young man who uses his ability to manipulate time mainly to undress buxom women. That film was a strange, perhaps unconscious comment on the leering power a director wields, and it's one that Ellis exercises again in The Broken -- the actresses in this film take so many baths and showers that it's a wonder they have any time left to flee their pursuers. Ellis has definitely got chops, and the film manages to sustain its tension even when little is going on, but I wish he hadn't telegraphed some of his twists quite so early. It's admirable that Ellis tells us as little about these doubles as he does -- it leaves more room for the viewer's own subconscious to fill in the creepy details -- but some of the shocks involving them are revealed far too soon. As an actress, Headey projects so much intelligence that when the audience knows more than she does, it definitely feels like something's gone broken.
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