INSIGHT PAPER

Psychological Perspective on the Self

MOVIE TITLE: Fractured

Ray Monroe (Sam Worthington) is traveling with his wife Joanne (Lily Rabe) and
daughter Peri (Lucy Capri) when tragedy strikes. They stop off at a gas station and Peri wanders
away to look at a part of the site that’s under construction. She’s startled by a stray dog, who
moves toward her as Peri backs up to the edge of the construction site. Ray turns around to see
her, throwing a rock at the dog as Peri falls backward, landing on the concrete below. As Ray
jumps to save her, he also falls. He wakes up in a daze with Joanne yelling at him, and the trio
quickly speeds off to a nearby hospital. Inside the hospital the health workers were not really
cooperating with him, he was asking where was his wife and daughter, but the workers said he
came in alone. He believes that they did something bad with them so he acted alone to find them
in the basement of the hospital. But in the middle of the movie Ray was treated by a psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist manages to make some breakthroughs in Ray's psyche, discovering that
he's been carrying trauma from a car crash eight years previous that claimed the life of his first
wife. She 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 come to the conclusion that Ray accidentally killed his spouse and child
and is having a severe psychotic break to process it all.
Ray, however, doubles down on his own perspective, firm in the belief that something
nefarious is going on in the bowels of that hospital. He manages to sneak into the basement,
killing a security guard in the process, and finds an organ harvesting operation happening. He
manages to interject before his family are chopped up and break them 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 he's just broken out some poor person still knocked out
from the anesthetic.
The fall Ray took with Peri had 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. A key early moment in Fractured comes when
Ray, having fallen down 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 dead, and Joanne
was upset, and Ray had had enough of her, so he shoves her to the side, where her head lands
right on an outward facing nail amid the debris of construction.
What happens next is the big twist: having absolutely reached his limit, Ray compartmentalizes,
puts the bodies in the boot of his car and drives to a hospital to get his head looked at. While
doing this, though, he imagines that he and Joanne are actually getting treatment for Peri. Then
he passes out from all the exertion, and when he wakes up, he's back in the real world, where
those bodies are in his trunk and he came in to get a few stitches in his head. But he maintains his
memories of the imagined version, creating all sorts of chaos in the belief there's some
conspiracy against him.

INSIGHTS:
The theory that I would apply to the movie I choose, is the Defense Mechanisms.
Defense Mechanisms are unconscious psychological responses that protect the ego from anxiety.
I would say that the main character of the movie definitely had past trauma that lead him to have
the defense mechanisms he showed. Firstly, is the rationalization from the part that his actions
for throwing a stone at the dog that led his daughter to fall down a construction site. Secondly is
Denial, when the doctors said that he need to get his head checked for some injuries or he was
crazy, he ignored them and angrily said that he is perfectly fine and he is not crazy and that they
definitely hid his daughter and wife. Third is Repression, when he was told that he made an own
reality of his own by believing that he brought his wife and daughter to the hospital and ignored
what the psychiatrist said that he had trauma from his first wife which died in a card accident.
Lastly, there was a part of the movie that showed a scene that he and his kid fell, he quickly
checked his kid and saw that she was alive but that was his alternate reality, his daughter was
dead already the scene showed that he was angry and traumatized, he couldn’t hear his wife
yelling at him to carry her and go to the hospital, he pushed his wife so hard that she fell and hit
her head at a sharp metal, and the mother and kid both died in his hands, this was regression.

Ray the husband, acted this way because of his past trauma when his first wife died in a
car accident. I think this affected him in general, his behavior, actions and the way he thinks.
References
Netflix's Fractured Ending Explained: What Happened to Ray's Family (screenrant.com)