Calista Flockhart stars in this cruelly berated ghostly thriller form Jaume Balaguero, director of the similarly ridiculed Darkness.
The film centres on an old hospital on the Isle of Man which is due to close in a few days. All that remains in the hospital is a makeshift children’s ward, where the kids are suffering from mysterious injuries. When the night nurse quits following spooky goings on and plans to close are postponed, Amy (Flockhart) is drafted in to take the night shift and she soon discovers that the children’s stories of a menacing ‘mechanical girl’ are true.
The film looks great and has a wonderful cast and is full or rich, moody atmosphere as well as excellent special effects work and CGI so I was stumped as to what people hated so much about this. There are a few odd moments of stupidity courtesy of the script, such as the truly unforgivable scene which has a child run off to an abandoned wing alone for her blanket right in the middle of the climax, but this didn’t spoil the film for me.
The villain is truly chilling and there are some really good scares to be found here. I almost crapped it during one sequence where a little girl nonchalantly asks when the boy in the next bed had returned to the ward, only to be informed that he hasn’t! It’s one of those classic ‘then whose that next to me?’ moments.
OVERALL SUMMARY
Fragile has unfairly been dismissed as cliché ridden trash but it’s far from it. I certainly enjoyed it, but then my expectations weren’t too high in the first place.
