What Happened to Ray's Family

Summary In Fractured, it's revealed that Ray's family is dead and he accidentally killed them.

The truth slowly unravels as Ray is forced to confront his traumatic past.

Ray's mental state deteriorates as he struggles to distinguish between reality and delusion.

In Netflix's Fractured movie, a man is forced into a nightmare situation when his family goes missing at a hospital. Directed by Brad Anderson (The Machinist), Ray Monroe's (Sam Worthington) journey to find his wife and daughter after they mysteriously disappear is delivered in an unsettling fashion as the truth slowly comes to light. It starts when, on the way home from a tumultuous Thanksgiving with his in-laws, Ray, his wife Joanne (Lily Rabe), and daughter Peri (Lucy Capri) stop by a gas station.

While there, Ray and Peri fall into a pit, leaving Peri with a fractured arm. As frustration turns to worried exacerbation, the parents take their daughter to a nearby hospital, where, after some slightly odd questioning by staff, Peri is eventually seen, and Ray passes out in the waiting room. When he wakes up, however, he finds himself in a confusing situation. Nobody in the hospital can recall his wife and daughter, only treating him for a small head injury. Determined to get his family back, Ray goes down a paranoid rabbit hole.

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What Happens in Fractured's Ending

Ray Has A Psychotic Break When Authorities Learn The Truth

After Ray manages to break free from from hospital security in Fractured, the personnel bring in Dr. Jacobs (Adjoa Andoh) a psychiatric doctor to help calm him down and get to the bottom of what happened. Ray had alerted nearby police, and had the doctor that admitted his daughter for a CAT scan called in, as nobody currently on duty could remember him or find his or his family's names on record.

The psychiatrist manages to make some breakthroughs in Ray's psyche, discovering that he's been carrying trauma from a car crash eight years ago that claimed the life of his first wife. Dr. Jacobs convinces him to lead her and the officials on his case back to the gas station where the incident took place. There, they discover a bloodstain from the fall Peri took on a patch of construction work, and they come to the conclusion that Ray accidentally killed his spouse and child and is having a severe psychotic break to process it all.

Ray's just broken out some poor person still knocked out from the anesthetic.

Ray, however, doubles down on his perspective, firm in the belief that something nefarious is happening at the hospital. He sneaks into the basement, kills a security guard in the process, and finds an organ-harvesting operation. He manages to interject and breaks his family out. As the sun begins to rise, Ray starts singing with his family in the backseat as the camera fades to the truth: the area he was in was an operating theater, and Ray's just broken out some poor person still knocked out from the anesthetic.

The fall Ray took with Peri killed her, and he accidentally killed his wife by pushing her head onto a nail. Their bodies were in the trunk of his car, where he'd left them. Fractured ends with Ray driving off, likely to soon be arrested, in full psychosis that he'd finally managed to do something right as a father and husband.

Ray's Wife & Daughter Are Dead

He Accidentally Killed Them & Put Them In His Car Trunk

A key early moment in Fractured comes when Ray, having fallen after Peri, blacks out from a blow to the head. This is where reality gives way to Ray's warped point of view. In all the exhaustion from arguing with Joanne, and now this, where his failures seemed perpetual and unending, he snaps. Peri was dead, and Joanne was distraught. Ray had had enough of her, so he shoved her to the side, where her head landed right on an outward-facing nail amid the debris of construction.

What happens next is the big Fractured twist: having reached his limit, Ray compartmentalizes, puts the bodies in the trunk of his car, and drives to a hospital to get his head looked at. While doing this, he imagines he and Joanne are getting treatment for Peri. Ray passes out, and when he wakes up, he's back in the real world, where the bodies are in his trunk, and he comes in to get a few stitches in his head. But he maintains his memories of the imagined version, creating chaos in the belief there's some conspiracy against him.

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Ray Is Completely Mentally Broken By The End

Ray Has No Concept Of Reality As He Leaves Hospital

As the truth closes in, Ray becomes more and more irrational in order to maintain his version where Joanne and Peri are still alive. He steals weapons, fakes identities, and murders a police officer. What started as a heinous crime becomes unimaginably worse the more Ray carries on.

Ray's story in Fractured is a grim, harrowing reminder that people need to be mindful of trauma.

After eight years of carrying around the pain of watching his first wife die, Ray can't take anymore and decides the world must change when he's faced with yet another tragedy. When he finally manages to get back in his car with his family in the backseat, he's in full belief that he's done the right thing and starts singing with his now imaginary family. Ray's story in Fractured is a grim, harrowing reminder that people need to be mindful of trauma and to seek help when faced with horrendous tragedy.

The Real Meaning Of The Fractured Ending

Ray Is Incapable Of Processing His Grief

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There was one final shot in the movie that Brad Anderson said he added to emphasize that Ray might be about to realize everything he's done and return to reality. If this happens, the ending could be even more tragic than anyone could have suspected. That scene had Ray's grin as he imagined he was singing with his family suddenly turning into a grimace. It is as if he might have realized something wasn't right. Anderson explains this last shot (via Fresh Fiction).

"The last frame of the movie is a close up of Ray’s face after he’s just sung a song to his child in the backseat and his wife. It’s a sense of accomplishment and being a hero. ‘I did it! I saved them from the bad guys at the hospital.’ But then we kept it rolling, and in the last frames, you start to see his face fall, like it just dawned on him."

In the movie itself, up until that final moment, it seems that Ray is living in his own delusions. When the police finally catch up to him and arrest him, he will likely end up in a psychiatric hospital as doctors try to help him regain his grip on reality. He killed a police officer, so his wife and daughter's deaths are the least of his worries. The ending shows that he is a broken man. However, that last shot in Fractured suggests that he might be snapping back into reality, and his horrors are just beginning.