The Broken and the nature of personal trauma

I've read quite a few of the interpretations of THE BROKEN on this board, so here's my two cents.

While the film strongly suggests that evil duplicates are trying to take over our world through mirrors, I think that this is only used as a plot device to explore the nature of personal trauma, especially head trauma, through metaphor and symbolism. Victims of trauma experience a wide variety of disorientation and identity crisis, from memory loss to feelings of displacement, aside from the psychological condition known as Capgras that's mentioned directly in the movie. The original Gina and the replacement Gina represent the Gina before the accident and the Gina after the accident; this echoes how some trauma victims feel that the traumatic event "killed" their previous selves. By extension, the duplicates that slowly invade Gina's life--the ones of her boyfriend, her brother's girlfriend, and her father--each represent how the trauma changed Gina and how she functions in the world around her, as her familiar and friendly pre-trauma world is destroyed and replaced by the colder, mysterious post-trauma world. Once Gina understands that she and her world have been permanently changed, there's no going back. In real life, severe traumas have the potential to tear families and other kinds of relationships apart. THE BROKEN approaches the topic of broken people and relationships by using conventions of the horror genre, which I think make it a very effective film for what it is.

Essentially, I consider a film like THE BROKEN to be a "Lost Soul" movie, movies that usually revolve around a protagonist who has experienced some kind of forgotten trauma. The trauma is forgotten either because it happened so long ago or that it was so intense and violent that it caused the protagonist to experience memory loss. The protagonist is also haunted as the result of the trauma. The hauntings may be the result of hallucinations induced by the trauma, or they may be caused by a supernatural presence; depending on the movie, the difference between the hallucinatory and the supernatural is never made clear and they remain indistinguishable. The hauntings prompt the protagonist to try to understand the trauma, which results in the revelation of an existential truth so shocking that the protagonist is never the same again. In that sense, THE BROKEN is very similar to CARNIVAL OF SOULS, THE ABANDONED, DONNIE DARKO, JACOB'S LADDER, and HEAD TRUAMA. I also wrote about how this applies to the recent SILENT HILL video game, SHATTERED MEMORIES, on my blog. Check it out here: http://titansterrorstoys.blogspot.com/2011/03/remembering-lost-souls-of-silent-hill.html.