DVD review (region 2)
Directed by Jaume Balagueró
Starring Calista Flockhart, Yasmin Murphy, Richard Roxburgh
Release date 2 July 2007

A ghost starts snapping bones at a run down children’s hospital on the Isle of Wight. No one takes the children seriously when they claim the injuries to be the work of the mysterious ‘mechanical girl’ who haunts the unused second floor; until the arrival of Amy, the new night shift nurse…

The Weinstein brothers called Jaume Balagueró’s previous effort, Darkness, the worst horror film they’d seen in years. They co-executive produced that film and many felt their lack of faith in it, and the intrusive edits they insisted on, were responsible for the resulting mess. In the unlikely event that Miramax’s founders have sat through Fragile, they will at least have gained a new entry to top their ‘worst-of’ list and a feeling of vindication that no one can point the finger at them.

As director and co-writer the blame lies largely with Balagueró who appears to lack even the most rudimentary skills in crafting a decent horror. That Fragile offers nothing new is no surprise, and could be forgiven if only the film presented its standard run of suspense and shocks with anything approaching aptitude. It follows the model of the long build up leading to the big pay off but fails to deliver either. The first half generates boredom rather than suspense while the second offers some wholly unlikely events, inevitable plot twists and a horribly sentimental ending.

There is one sequence where Balagueró almost manages to conjure up an element of suspense, but he blows it by having the ghost tottering out of the shadows looking like a geriatric version of Marilyn Manson. Even that makes it sound better than it is; Fragile isn’t laughably bad, it’s just unremittingly tedious.

Calista Flockhart, as Amy, gets through it somehow, giving her usual subdued performance, and Yasmin Murphy, as the cystic fibrosis-sufferer Maggie, manages to stay on the right side of sickeningly cute, which is rare in child actors today. The rest of the cast pretty much fail to register in roles not dissimilar to any low-rent British hospital drama. Indeed, one way to picture this film would be to imagine if Holby City did a horror-themed episode.

DVD extras include ‘The Making of Fragile’. The question being, why did they bother? Joe Green

VERDICT: 2/10
Prognosis negative.