The Ward Review


Movie: The Ward
By: WalkingToForever
Date: June 15, 2011

Insane in The ...

After a nearly ten year long sabbatical , John Carpenter managed to surprise his fans with ‘The Ward’. ‘The Ward’ came out in 2010, ten years after his last film ‘Ghosts of Mars’, which was ill received in cinemas. Fans were excited and hopeful for this new horrific creation because John Carpenter guarantees a night of pure horror. But did ‘The Ward’ live up to expectation?

After a nearly ten year long sabbatical , John Carpenter managed to surprise his fans with ‘The Ward’. ‘The Ward’ came out in 2010, ten years after his last film ‘Ghosts of Mars’, which was ill received in cinemas. Fans were excited and hopeful for this new horrific creation because John Carpenter guarantees a night of pure horror. But did ‘The Ward’ live up to expectation?

A quick scan of the internet pages dedicated to the subject show that not everyone agrees. And for good reason.

the ward 1

Disturbed Kristen is taken into the women’s ward of a psychiatric hospital. It soon becomes clear that she is held against her will and that she doesn’t agree with her diagnostic. She refuses to take her medication and fights her guards. Soon she discovers that not everything is as it seems in the hospital. She has no idea why she is held here and when she discovers that women have disappeared from the same ward she is being kept in she decides to investigate. The four other women in her ward are unhelpful and mysterious and only create questions rather than answers. It becomes clear that the Ward is terrorised by evil forces.

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The film’s setting is very strong and well shot. The psychiatric hospital seems, even with its bright lit hallways and clean white walls, the darkest and most scariest place to be. The building with secret passages, locked doors and hidden rooms makes for a terrific Gothic atmosphere. This atmosphere is skillfully held up throughout the film by image, but also by sound. Weather; rain and thunder are cleverly used to tense up certain moments. At one point the women in the Ward find some relaxation by dancing to loud music, the happy moment is suddenly interrupted when the storm outside – seen constantly through the windows – cuts off the power. Darkness and thunder take the screen and pull us right back into the eerie presence of something looming.

The film holds some very clever startle moments, though most of them are created by sudden sound rather than images, a few are created by very clever camera work. The shower scenes and the scenes in the hospital’s mortuary are shot with expertise for tension-building. Did we see something move? Or didn’t we?

The environment of unexplained presence and unexplained disappearances is violated by an occasional torture and gore scene. Short and flashy, they offer no twist or turn in the plot and they seem to add nothing to the story’s threat. They seem to be added only because that is what all the other contemporary horror films have as well.

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The character’s in this film, though as in all good films they do eventually die, have never really been alive. Whether because of their acting or because of their script, the characters and dialogue all sound stiff and shallow. The plot of the story is a complete surprise – which is good – but only because we never really get to know the characters. They are unconvincing ..strange, and remain so even when we do know what happens next...

So John Carpenter made a new film in 2010. Finally. And according to some, he did so totally in his own style a la ‘Halloween’ and ‘The Thing’ but that doesn’t mean that he lived up to expectations. I believe that it is because of this attempt at the old that the film completely lacks originality. The scenes, the flat characters, the evil and even the plot have already been done. Fans of the horrific might remember ‘Identity’ a film by James Mangold (2003) which covers the same plot...only better.


3/5




Movie

The Ward

Title

The Ward

Director

John Carpenter

Country

USA

Year

2010

Cast

Amber Heard, Amber Heard, Danielle Panabaker