Movie Review - The Ward

There is something about an asylum that draws us to them as a central setting for a horror movie. They house people who are scary; some patients may have murdered people, others might be incomprehensible. And asylums are a dark blight on medical science, with numerous reports of lobotomies and electroshock therapy deep within their past. So John Carpenter revisits a time when all of these things really could happen, where cameras weren't watching every patient's move, by traveling back to 1966 in North Bend, Oregon.

The Ward is first and foremost a ghost story about revenge. Kristen (Amber Heard) burns down a house and gets locked away in North Bend's asylum, where she meets four other girls who are also locked away. But the strange happenings at the asylum seem connected to Alice, a girl who disappeared from the asylum before Kristen arrived. When the girls start getting butchered in various displays of grisly psychological treatment, Kristen sets out to find out what happened to Alice.

John Carpenter isn't on his A-game here, especially during the scarier parts of the film. Where his main focus used to be creating tension through slow escalations, The Ward resembles one of the newer breeds of slasher, where sequences are drawn out only long enough to provide Alice a reasonable way to kill her victim. Despite Alice's gruesomely burnt face, her appearance is never very frightening - and Carpenter, it seems, never attempts to make it feel that way either. He resorts to easy jump scares, like hands reaching up behind the girls or an appearance of the woman behind the characters after they turn around. Why is it that we must resort to such tedium, especially when Carpenter refuses to try to counteract our expectations? It makes The Ward a hard pill to swallow, a generic grouping of easy spooks that won't work on veteran horror viewers.

At least The Ward has a twist, if rather shallow. It's certainly not a new concept, although it works here fairly well. If there's anything wrong with the finale, it's that it never explains Alice's burnt face - if she was strangled, surely her face wouldn't have swelled up like a prune. It all feels like Carpenter included Alice's disfigurement because The Ward needed something eerie, and it shows you how little faith he had in his own bland scares in the first place.

But I'll tell you what - up until Alice was fully revealed, The Ward had me pretty enraptured with its five female characters. Their personalities are so different - and rightfully so, since they need to be - and the script does a fine job of developing them into more rounded two-dimensional characters, if that makes sense. And Alice does get some nice special effects makeup, even if her full visage isn't as terrifying as it could be shrouded in a little mystery. But ultimately The Ward is an emaciated film from John Carpenter, and it's something that should be locked away rather than reveled as another Carpenter great. In fact, take the title as a warning to stay away from it.

The Ward on Rotten Tomatoes