The story of a young girl in North London whose life changes after witnessing a violent attack.
Eloise Laurence gives a terrific performance as a 13-year-old navigating a tricky set of neighbours in this British dramedy.
Newcomer Laurence gives the standout performance as the smart, precociously mature tween, but the ensemble cast all handle the tough, emotionally honest material with sensitivity.
One of the ironies of Broken is that the super-smart, self-assured and utterly bewitching performance of its young star Eliose Laurence is so brilliant, it actually exposes the film around her for the crock of hooey it really is.
By the end, it's like Brookside on speed, hurtling round corners from one crisis to another, barely able to catch its breath. O'Rowe has done good work before – Intermission, Boy A – but this nervous breakdown of a movie will be best forgotten.
The cast are terrific – including Cillian Murphy as a sympathetic teacher – but it’s a tough watch.
Actors of this calibre can't do anything other than a good job but the basic form of the drama is, for me, tangled and clotted.
What really impresses are the performances from a uniformly fine cast, with newcomer Eloise Laurence clearly a talent to watch.
It feels relentlessly miserable and shocking – as if all the most lurid events in two decades of Brookside had been squeezed into 90 minutes.
What for most of the time is an engaging state-of-the nation piece in the manner of the late Alan Clarke finally erupts into unpersuasive, blood-drenched melodrama that is no doubt intended as a wake-up call to a troubled country.
Broken is a farcically overwrought drama that probably means well, but is ham-fisted in its portrayal of real-life issues.
Glasgow Film Theatre, Glasgow from Friday March 8, 2013, until Thursday March 21, 2013. More info: http://www.glasgowfilm.org/theatre/
Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee from Friday March 15, 2013, until Thursday March 21, 2013. More info: www.dca.org.uk
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