Tracey Berkowitz (Ellen Page) is a 15 year old girl out in the night looking for her little brother Sonny who barks like a dog. She gets bullied at school and lust for the new guy in school named Billy Zero.Director Bruce McDonald is experimenting here with a 'fragmented' visual experience. The most striking thing is the multi-panel split screen throughout the entire movie. I've seen this done in extended segments. To me, it never works. It diffuses all the big moments. It makes big time acting look small. It tries to complicate things visually but ends up making things look simplistic.The biggest asset this movie has is Ellen Page. She's magnetic even when her image is reduced and subdivided. I have to think the split screen gimmick added nothing to this movie. If it was shot as a traditional indie, there's a chance of a more compelling movie. I like people experimenting, but I've seen this experiment before and I've yet to see it work out.

The Tracey Fragments is a journey into the conundrums of human memory. The presentation and structure of the movie make it worthwhile watch for any cinemaphile.The use of multi-frame compositions is excellent, if flawed. The Tracey Fragments is at times uncomfortable to watch, but appropriately so. When Tracey relives the traumatic moments irreversibly etched into her memory, it is only appropriate you experience sympathetic distress. To watch this film you must make an active effort to obtain information by selecting a screen to focus upon, and consequentially you feel more like a participant than a voyeur. Through extremely sparing use of scenes with a traditional single frame, it makes these few scenes stand out like the crescendo of a George Gershwin song. The flaw with this film's extreme use of the medium to affect the audience's emotions is that it is apparent that it is doing so. Although you see the magician's trick, the showmanship is superb.Whereas the film's presentation empowers you to take an active role in partaking the movie visually, the storytelling is too authoritative. The presentation of the plot in disjointed fragments is conceptually excellent, but flawed in execution. Unlike David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, The Tracey Fragments does not blend fanciful fabrications and recollection of fact; the plot fragments are presented as a dichotomy of fruits of Tracey's imagination, and memories of formal events. However, It becomes increasingly evident throughout the movie, that Tracey's actual memories may be as misleading as the figments of her imagination.This film was shot in only 14 days, and it shows in the poor construction of some of the scenes. These shortcomings only make the movie a better analog for the memory of Tracey Berkowitz. The writing seems like a rough draft, but is all the more creepy for it. Ellen Page is excellent, even though she is more pretty than Tracey should be. The scenes with Tracey and Lance (played by Max McCabe-Lokos) are notably good and indicative of a chemistry built from previous work together.The Tracey Fragments is centered around its unique and powerful emotional impact. It is thought-provoking as well, but it is not notable as a purely cerebral thriller. I rate it highly on the merits of its strengths not on its lack of shortcomings. If it seems at all interesting to you, watch it; the worst possible outcome is that you won't like it.

Tracey Berkowitz is a 15y.o. girl on a night bus, covered by a curtain shower, talking directly to you - nonsense. He memory is fragmented, chaotic, fancy, and on a loop. She has left home, is looking for her missing little brother Sonny and is in trouble.We are drawn into Tracey's chaotic mind and soul, but also towards her path of growth from child to woman, from fairy-tale worlds to harsh reality and acceptance of the self. This is a very interesting story about a teenager that is not pretty, cleaver or happy. Although this is a movie about teenagers, there is nothing sweet about it, as presents very hard topics: rape, bullying, loneliness, lack of self-esteem, confused self-image, delusional thoughts, insecurity, and mental trouble.Tracey's memory fragments and thoughts appear in mini-screens within the screen and on split-screen images, which show different angles of the same scene or different scenes altogether. The non-linear narrative is very challenging. Pay extra attention to the first 15-20 minutes of the film, because they are the most difficult and the ones that really give clues to understand many of the things that happen later on.The film is more complex, visually, at the beginning, when Tracey's mind and emotions are more confused, and becomes simpler and more linear at the same pace that Tracey's mind clears, to be completely linear at the end, when she accepts herself and the events related to Sonny. In other words, Tracey's troubled mind and emotions are directly linked to the way the movie is visually organized. The movie is also full of symbolic psychoanalytical elements, from the gender of Tracey's psychiatrist and the settings in which the consultation happens, to the appearance of different animals (a crow, a horse, and "a dog"), to the way the scenes have been patched and shown to the viewer.Ellen Page is fantastic, despite the dramatic demands of her character. She was 20 when the film was shot, but she is believable as a 15y.o. girl. That's not only her physique, is the great actress she is. The rest of the cast are OK in their respective roles: Ari Cohen and Erin McMurtry as Mr & Mrs Berkowitz; Zie Souwand as sweet Sonny; Toronto Songwriter and performer Slim Twigg as jerk Billy Zero, Julain Richings as Dr Heker, among others.A few important flaws ruined what could have been a great movie. The main idea is brilliant but, since we get mostly Tracey's subjective approach to reality, the rest of the characters are somewhat pointless and can't be trusted by the viewer; in fact they are just hinted. I did not like the end, not the way it ended, but how the end was presented and how we get there - what triggers Tracey's epiphany? That is so because the mood of the movie and, most importantly, its tempo were not the right ones.This is one of those movies that are a challenge for the viewers, that need of their full awareness and attention, that have a difficult knot to untie, but also one of those movies that can be interpreted in different ways and make your brain produce sparks. One of those movies that you get or you don't, nothing in between. To me, one of those movies that, the more I think about it, the more I want to watch again.Are you ready for it?

An exercise in experimental cinema. The director is too busy experimenting with nifty editing techniques and an unusual visual style rather than focusing on telling a cohesive and interesting narrative. The director's visual tricks aren't even as effective as the director probably wants them to be. At the beginning the movie the visuals are come off as genuinely unique. By the end of the visual tricks become repetitive, annoying and irritating.I'm usually fine with abstract, indirect, non-linear storytelling, but to keep my attention it has to be at least mildly interesting. Ellen Page is decent, but she isn't given enough to do.My patience was tested while watching this tedious production.