“You stay locked up long enough and you start to believe you’re nuts.”
As of this writing, John Carpenter is still alive, which means he has the chance (or the obligation) to end his illustrious directing career on a higher note than The Ward. (To be fair, Carpenter did direct one episode of his Peacock series, Suburban Screams, but we both know I’m talking about feature films here.) It’s unclear what about The Ward lured Carpenter to the director’s chair for the first time since 2001’s Ghosts of Mars. It’s an almost aggressively bland film and were it not for the telltale Gothic Nickel font, viewers could be forgiven for forgetting that Carpenter was involved with this at all.
We meet Kristen (Amber Heard) on the run from…something, it’s unclear what. She runs through deserted farmland, police sirens in the distance, until she finds herself at a derelict farmhouse. She sets the house ablaze, which turns out to be a bad idea because the cops immediately descend upon her and throw her in the back of their squad car. So far so good: the setup is intriguing, and Heard looks to make a good scream queen. The rural isolation is daunting (but The Ward wasn’t filmed in Carpenter’s trademark Panavision, and as a result the whole movie looks a little flat). While I enjoy movies that maintain the unity of setting – Carpenter’s own The Thing is probably the absolute best example of this – when The Ward gets to its titular institution it starts to fall apart.
Asylum horror is nothing new, nor does The Ward bring anything new to it (it should be noted that this takes place in 1966). I know that sounds dismissive, but asylum horror, when done right, can make for a terrific sub-genre (think Shock Corridor or Unsane, or the bonkers second season of American Horror Story). The production design on display is impressive, and includes some nice details that add verisimilitude (the inmates are not allowed belts or shoelaces, for instance). What’s most striking about the ward itself is just how damn empty it is. There are only five inmates, and no more than three or four employees, all of whom seem to work 24-hour shifts, because they show up consistently in both day and night scenes. Distressingly, this sense of isolation doesn’t translate to the film itself, so it ends up with the same problem as The New Mutants, where instead of being scared by the empty asylum we’re wondering how thin the workforce is stretched.
Kristen’s fellow inmates are Sarah (Danielle Panabaker), catty and cruel; Iris (Lyndsy Fonseca), empathetic and artistic; Zoey (Laura-Leigh), seemingly mute; and Emily (Mamie Gummer, laying it on real thick to the point of near-unwatchability), erratic and unpredictable. All the girls are pretty one-note; the film justifies this later on, but it doesn’t make for a more interesting watch in the leadup to that. The hospital staff includes an ersatz Nurse Ratched named Lundt, who doesn’t even pretend at compassion or impartiality, and an orderly named Roy, who right away we sense as evil, but who turns out to have surprising depths. The cast is rounded out by Jared Harris as Dr. Gerald Stringer, and as always, Harris immediately classes up the joint; the man is renowned for using his honeyed brogue to elevate low-rent horror fare like this or Poltergeist or The Quiet Ones. Stringer is well-known for his experimental approach to therapy, which sounds sinister, but he presents as a perfect gentleman (albeit worryingly oblivious; he turns his back for one second and Kristen is able to swipe his letter opener).
Of course, things at the ward right away seem amiss. Kristen sees someone outside her cell at night, even though none of the inmates have permission to be out at night. She finds beads from a charm bracelet hidden in her pillowcase; they spell ALICE. We see glimpses of a little girl, chained up somewhere dark, as a burly man approaches her and starts unbuckling his belt (the girl has no lines but is notable for being played by a very young Sydney Sweeney). Things escalate quickly when Kristen is attacked by a disfigured ghoul during a comically unmotivated shower scene featuring all five young women. Emily believes her story; Zoey, Iris, and Sarah do not. From here on, Gummer’s performance improves drastically. She excels in the quiet moments in which Emily gets to be a human and not just an irritant. So now the women have been split into factions, although if I’m being fair only Sarah is outwardly hostile, while Zoey and Iris take the Swiss approach.
At this point two things happen: escape becomes Kristen’s primary goal, and The Ward truly starts to spin its wheels. There’s a marked absence of stakes and consequences, which dulls any potential narrative tension. When Lundt discovers Kristen and Emily trying to escape, she doesn’t even sound an alarm. When they’re inevitably caught, no additional security measures are enacted, they’re just returned to their cells. Here’s where it becomes evident that the problems with The Ward are due less to John Carpenter’s direction and more to the weak script by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen (who later wrote Crawl, so they’re not total hacks at least). You can see the twist coming a mile away; we’re dealing with your classic Identity/Split/Shutter Island scenario.
The moments that work do so because of Carpenter’s approach to the material. There’s very little CGI and the film is better for it. The kills are creative and there are even a few effective jump scares. The Ward isn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen for this column – that dubious honor still belongs to Hatchet – but it might be one of the most frustrating. By all accounts, Carpenter is happy in his retirement, and the man who gave us Halloween, The Fog, The Thing, They Live, Escape from New York, Prince of Darkness, and In the Mouth of Madness has the right to hang it up whenever he feels like it. I just hope he ends up going out on a higher note than this.
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