‘ReBroken’ Review
Stars: Scott Hamm Duenas, Kipp Tribble, Alison Haislip, Tobin Bell, Nija Okoro, Kenny Yates, Richard Siegelman, Blake Koren, Billy Walker | Written by Scott Hamm Duenas, Kipp Tribble | Directed by Kenny Yates
Kipp Tribble, writer of the lacklustre Evil At the Door, teams up with his co-stars in that film Scott Hamm Duenas and Kenny Yates – who is also known as a producer on films as diverse as horrors Hunt Club and Wolf Mountain AND spoofs like Disaster Movie, The Starving Games and Superfast! – for a film that takes a supernatural look at grief and the struggle to cope with loss…
Will is a devastated father who spends his time between court-ordered grief counselling and drinking himself into oblivion. He repeats the cycle of despair every day with no plans to stop, until he meets a mysterious stranger who gives him some old vinyl recordings. After Will listens to the records, he suddenly starts receiving messages from his recently deceased daughter. As the communications from his daughter grow more and more frequent, Will becomes convinced that these recordings hold the answer to bring his daughter back from the dead. But just as he is closing in on the truth, he starts to suspect that his counselling group has ulterior motives. After the stranger disappears, Will races against time to find him so he can get the last recording, or his chance to bring his daughter back might be gone forever.
Billed as somewhere between horror and thriller, ReBroken is at best a meandering, slow-burn of a film that reads of self-importance whilst having very little to say. It’s certainly something of an ambitious film, trying to approach the subject of death, loss and the afterlife with gravitas but that’s all the film has… gravitas. What’s missing from ReBroken is heart – the film might deal with very emotional subject matter but doesn’t really connect emotionally on any level. Instead, the film feels very by-the-numbers, with actors merely “acting” (aka reciting the script) rather than emoting and FEELING what they’re saying. There’s no truth to what most of this film’s characters say.
It also doesn’t help that ReBroken’s script presents the audience with question after question, without ever really letting us in on the answers. And when we do get answers, in the film’s denouement it feels like something of a cop-out, almost under-cutting everything that has come before.
But hey, at least we get the 2010s internet darling Alison Haislip in a key role, it really was great to see her on screen!
** 2/5
ReBroken is available on DVD and Digital in the US now, courtesy of Gravitas Ventures.
