I walked out of The Ward with a heavy heart. Here was John Carpenter’s comeback, a film that looked like a modest return to his roots after the failure of 2001’s Ghosts of Mars. A recent NY Times piece on Carpenter saw the man admit that Ghosts was the cinematic straw that broke the camel's back. Now, the writer/director of some of the most influential horror films in the last 50 years (Halloween and The Thing number among them) is back. That makes it especially unfortunate that The Ward is another misfire, a dull thriller with a groan-inducing ending twist.
The second film this year to involve young ladies trying to make a break for it inside of a mental asylum (Sucker Punch, lest we forget), The Ward opens with a murder inside the asylum, immediately followed by the curious sight of Kristen (Amber Heard) setting fire to an idyllic farmhouse and collapsing before it as it burns down. She’s promptly delivered to the asylum and handed over to Dr. Stringer (Jared Harris), who heads up what we are told is a new therapeutic program, but the film never goes deeper into it. Kristen is set up in a wing of a hospital that she shares with Iris (Lyndsy Fonseca), Sarah (Danielle Panabaker), Emily (Mamie Gummer), and Zoey (Laura Leigh).
Each of the ladies exhibits a personality flaw but none of them, Kristen included, seem particularly inclined to insanity – more on that later. The wing works like this – during the day, the girls are free to walk about, but at night, they are isolated to their rooms. When Kristen begins to see a horrifically scarred visage time and time again, she makes a decision to a) get to the bottom of this mystery and b) escape the asylum.
Heard isn’t asked to do much beyond look alternately scared and determined, and she acquits herself well enough here. It seems to this writer that films like Drive Angry are more rewarding for the actress since Heard thrives on playing the tough chick. The rest of the cast are largely unremarkable, no doubt due in part to the limp dialogue that they’re fed. The biggest challenge standing in my way of liking The Ward was the script, a hodgepodge of flat horror setpieces directed with minimal flair by Carpenter. I could understand a desire for an old school approach, but the asylum simply doesn’t make your spine crawl. It’s too artificial, feeling like a set despite probably being shot on location somewhere – a feat that Brad Anderson’s Session 9 used as a major leg up.
The scares are mostly jumps, a sudden rising pitch on the soundtrack and a tug of the camera. When the ladies start disappearing and panic sets in, it becomes difficult to care since, with the exception of Kristen, the supporting cast is defined by personality quirks or worse, props. Zoey, for example, wears glasses and keeps a drawing pad on hand, which The Ward takes to mean she’s intelligent and levelheaded. She’s so well put-together, in fact, that we begin to question her place in the asylum, and while that may have been the greatest strength of the film, the ending sinks the movie without a doubt.
I won’t go on to spoil it here, but let’s say The Ward features an ending you’ve seen before and one that will genuinely feel like a cop-out. After thinning out the herd big time and leading us down the road to what seems like a big set piece, the revelation that explains the inscrutable events of the film is at best lazily concocted. It’s a challenge not to heave at least a sigh at the screen, condemning the film to be forgotten and pondering what attracted Mr. Carpenter to the project in the first place.
This is slightly above-average assignment work and Carpenter has always had a kind of grinning menace to his best (the last shot of They Live comes to mind), an attitude that we’re not going to take it anymore or at least a smirk that reminded us that some genuinely bad shit can happen in life and people can be stretched thin by extraordinary circumstances. The Ward is Carpenter on lock and key, in a directorial straitjacket if you will, delivering old-school thrills that ring hollow and move no one in particular.
"The Ward" opens July 8, 2011 and is rated PG13. Drama, Horror, Thriller. Directed by John Carpenter. Written by Michael Rasmussen, Shawn Rasmussen. Starring Amber Heard, Danielle Panabaker, Jared Harris, Mamie Gummer, Lyndsy Fonseca, Laura Leigh.
