There’s a queasy sense of foreboding attached to the nervy Netflix thriller Fractured, partly because we know something sinister is afoot but mostly because we have been here before and we have a good idea of where we are headed. The film, from reliable genre tradesman Brad Anderson, recalls a great number of thrillers, from The Lady Vanishes to Flight Plan to Unknown to Shutter Island to Dream House, and at times it buckles under this comparative weight, a Frankenwork struggling to justify the reasons why it was stitched together in the first place.

But when I wasn’t busying myself making an internal checklist of films I was reminded of, I was happily playing armchair detective, curious enough to engage with the pieces I was given. The film’s main pawn is Ray (Sam Worthington), a man travelling back from a disastrous family Thanksgiving with his wife, Joanne (Lily Rabe), and young daughter, Peri (Lucy Capri). It’s a tense journey, filled with clunky expository dialogue (at one point Joanne refers to him as “the guy that I married six years ago”) but there’s a twitchiness over what will happen, Anderson overlaying the mundanity with a devilish score and a grim, washed-out aesthetic. There follows a well-orchestrated accident, the specifics of which I won’t reveal, but Peri is left injured and the parents are left panicked, rushing her to the nearest hospital.

But after dealing with the horrors of medical insurance (the film offers up a rarely dramatised example of the grinding bureaucracy involved with paying for one’s healthcare), Ray is faced with something far more horrifying. His daughter is sent for a scan, accompanied by his wife as he’s told to wait upstairs, but hours later, they’re nowhere to be found. Oh, and just to make things worse, the hospital claims that they were never there in the first place. Is Ray losing his mind? Is the hospital part of a sinister conspiracy? Is Sam Worthington able to emote?

Anderson’s career is populated with closely filed genre variations. After two indie romcoms, he moved over to, and has stayed firmly on, the dark side, giving us eerily effective lo-fi horror (Session 9), dank and dreary neo-noir (The Machinist), snowy Hitchcockian suspense (Transsiberian), glossy race-against-time action (The Call), intriguing political espionage (Beirut) and gothic period chills (Stonehearst Asylum). Fractured sits comfortably alongside, probably closest to Transsiberian and The Call, with the wintry bleakness of the first and the involving propulsion of the latter. It never feels like much of a stretch for him but it’s also never less than watchable thanks to some unexpected directorial choices and a curious, compelling mystery at its centre. Given the familiar territory, it’s less a question of “Where will this go?” and more of “Which similarly plotted film’s twist ending will it most closely resemble?”, a less surprising game but a fun one nonetheless.

Worthington, an actor of astoundingly limited range, makes for a bland Liam Neeson replacement but since his character spends most of the film confused and given how overstuffed the film is with plot, his vacant expression doesn’t prove to be a major distraction. He’s just a cog and the film is just a machine, slick but soulless and with parts in need of a touch-up. Not broken exactly, but more, ahem, fractured.

• Fractured is now available on Netflix