Broken is a crime thriller that opens in a police interview room in Hope, Canada (the name is ironic), in which Brian (Griffin Cork) cools his heels waiting for the interrogation to begin. Chief Kimball (co-screenwriter Laura Buckles) and Agent Thomas (Neil Chase) want to question him about a drug deal and some missing people. See, Brian is the manager of a nightclub for Melvin “Baby Bear” Anderson (whom we only hear on the phone, never see), but he is also part of Baby Bear’s drug ring. The story then unfolds in a series of flashbacks as Brian narrates his crazy weekend.

At the behest of Baby Bear, Brian and best friend Steven drive a minivan to a rural Canadian town to swap for an exact model in order to drop a drug shipment. Brian, mixing work with pleasure, decides to bring girlfriend Katie along, because, hey – free vacation.

Things, of course, start to go wrong. Steven, Brian and Katie are enjoying a rural Canadian hotel and decide to get some snacks from the nearby convenience store where the clerk acts strangely, but that’s okay. Until Brian goes back into the store because he forgot his debit card and discovers the store was being held up by a crazy-eyed young woman, at which point violence ensues.

Steven wants to go to the police while Brian wants to clear out and head back home. In investigating the convenience store shootout, Chief Kimball posits an outsider to their small town must be involved. She remembers seeing two vehicles of the same make, model, year and color in the parking lot of a diner and begins to get suspicious.

This whole scenario represents the difficulty I had with Broken. No false leads, no uncertainty. It’s not like Kimball relentlessly pursues her quarry–everything is so linear, simple and pat. Convenience store shootout? I know the two cars involved in the crime from a day or two ago in a diner parking lot. The sense is not one of inevitability or fate, so much as a choose-your-own-adventure in which the sheriff just follows the footsteps to the guy who did it, and figures out along the way that they are also drug runners.

Similarly, we learn Katie’s backstory from the police, which makes sense, but also does not match how we have seen her behave in this scenario. She and Brian have it out in a scene that is meant to be emotionally connected and explain Brian’s choices but it reads as emotionally flat and disconnected, as well as continuing the improbable aspects of the film. He notes his mother is 33 and had him when she was 14, which makes him 19, and he most certainly is not.

There are some solid performances in Broken, but better writing may have elevated things. What does elevate the film is the cinematography, which is well done, especially the great and beautiful drone shots of rural Canadian towns and wilderness. While it may seem like a back-handed compliment to say the highlight of a character-driven film are the shots of the landscape, those shots are very effective at establishing place and mood.

6 out of 10