Broken

Doggedly manipulative and yet consistently affecting, Broken piles on the miserablism to almost unbearable effect.

Rufus Norris’s debut film, Broken, is a fractured, tonally scrambled British coming-of-age movie with flashes of greatness and an intensely felt performance by a young actress named Eloise Laurence.

Solidly done if somewhat unremarkable, there is nothing particularly wrong with "Broken," nothing that needs fixing exactly, and yet it never fully comes together.

Believably charts a girl’s coming of age but is eventually capsized by lurid melodrama.

At a certain point, Mr. Norris forsakes realism for theatricalized fantasy, and Broken ultimately loses its stylistic cohesion, if not its humanity.

Norris and his director of photography Rob Hardy have shot it with stylish confidence, but Mark O’Rowe’s script (adapted from Daniel Clay’s novel) feels cramped and over-schematic.

Awkward music cues and choppy camera work add baggage to a film so overwrought that its excesses seem more unintentionally silly than bleakly disturbing.