The mind-bending premise of Broken seems fit for a big-budget Hollywood feature, so it's surprising to see it unfold in a mere nineteen minutes of screen time. Late one night, Bonnie is awakened by a figure she mistakes for her boyfriend but is actually a malevolant kidnapper - the sort of villain who knows a little too much about his victim ahead of time. Unable to put up much of a struggle, she is whisked away to an underground bunker of sorts with nameless and imposing thugs where the rest of the grisly story takes place amidst a barrage of bullets before a twist ending that outdoes most Hollywood twists by actually meaningfully redefining everything that has transpired beforehand. This is a credit to first-time director and writer Alex Ferrari, a talented and capable young independent filmmaker, who along with co-writer Jorge F. Rodriguez otherwise might rightfully be accused by some of shoe-horning too much into such a brief framework. Given an overload of content and their obvious yet inconspicuously deliberate decision to adorn the film with standard psychological/action/thriller cliches, there is a temptation to dismiss the film and Ferrari as if his means and budget weren't able to accomodate what must be years of pent-up ideas. But he and the film are more clever than they seem, and despite the sorts of flaws one almost can't help but incur while making an independent short film, the result is a modestly satisfying addition to its genre.

I freely admit that I was uncomfortably confused up until the end, though, making little sense of the plot and even less sense of the broken harmonica metaphor. Many others are likely to feel the same; little is explained throughout, and when answers come at last I'm sure people will wince and scoff and chide Ferrari for plundering Hollywood's heritage. While a more seasoned storyteller could have avoided such discomfort or used it productively or artistically (which is where this film ultimately loses points), Ferrari saves a significant payoff for the end. Think about the word "broken" for a moment and the film suddenly and startlingly makes sense. Only material objects and parts, both by definition lifeless, are fragile enough to be broken. Anything else is intangible and even ethereal, the bounds of which are beyond human scope. As such, when Bonnie's painful secret is revealed at the end of Broken, Ferrari's narrative turns sharply into focus. In twenty minutes he delivers his treatise on the human condition and it becomes clear that no amount of splashy action scenes or superfluous story elements would obfuscate the point he's trying to make about free will, predestination, and the existence of a higher power. If a person may be said to have a broken psyche or spirit, then what does that say about the metaphysical nature of the human soul? Ferrari believes he has the answer.

(Broken is presently in the process of being made into a full-length feature film. For more information on this project and on the current short film version, please visit http://www.whatisbroken.com.)