But back to Skunk: Children are impressionable, and the sight of the attack stays with her. She worries that Rick will suffer treatment along the lines of what she saw in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Her own life is in flux, from a bourgeoning first love to anxiety over being bullied at a new school, where her nanny's commitment-fearing boyfriend (Cillian Murphy) works as a teacher. Skunk has Type 1 diabetes and monitors her blood sugar on her own. She has to be independent: Her mother walked out on the family, and her lawyer father (Tim Roth) raises them, perhaps slightly lovesick himself, as well as slightly wary of the brutish patriarch next door.

If it isn't obvious already—from the assonance of Skunk's name with Scout; the way Roth's solicitor is called on to defend the falsely accused; or the way Rick functions as a Boo Radley figure—"Broken" has been quite transparently conceived as an homage to "To Kill a Mockingbird," which author Daniel Clay, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, has acknowledged as an inspiration. At times the movie seems closer to full reworking than tribute, and there's a fascination in seeing a quintessentially American story transplanted to a British context. To the extent that "Broken" follows Harper Lee's template—observing a child's dawning awareness of the morally troubled world around her—it's quite good.

But context is key, and while Lee's masterwork turned an eye on 1930s Alabama, "Broken" doesn't show much interest in the world beyond the cul-de-sac. Dramatically, the film is a closed system, in which just about every major action prompts an unintended consequence, and the best intentions unfailingly go awry. In that sense, "Broken" owes more to didactic tapestry films like "Babel" than to one of the great works of 20th-century literature. Imagine "To Kill a Mockingbird" with multiple trumped-up medical emergencies and a cynically manipulative finale, and you might have a sense of how Norris's film plays by the end: broken, smashed, destroyed.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46bqaijlaN6c3yQbA%3D%3D