Opening in theaters Friday, July 8
Cast:
Amber Heard as Kristen
Mamie Gummer as Emily
Danielle Panabaker as Sarah
Laura-Leigh as Zoey
Lyndsy Fonseca as Iris
Jared Harris as Dr. Stringer
Directed by John Carpenter
Review:
Being a legend is both a blessing and a curse. Consider the case of John Carpenter: while he has a body of work that is guaranteed to endure, as a still-working filmmaker he must constantly go head to head with his own legacy. Finding himself in a position unhappily familiar to many of his fellow ’60s and ’70s-spawned “masters of horror,” each new Carpenter film has been greeted with disappointed grumbles for years now.
And when I say “for years,” I’m not just talking about since the early-’90s. In the introduction to a Carpenter interview published in the November 1982 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine, James Verniere wrote “â¦his detractors argue that Carpenter hasn’t made a good movie since Halloween (1978) â some say since Assault on Precinct 13 (1976).” And this was back when Carpenter’s recent output included classics like The Fog (1980), Escape from New York (1981), and The Thing (1982). Many note that Carpenter can come off as cynical, even slightly bitter, in interviews but given that almost every one of his movies since the earliest days of his career has been trashed upon release only to be belatedly revered (the kind of acclaim that’s the very definition of “too little too late”), I think he’s earned the right to be weary at whatever reception his movies receive.
It must be said though that it’s been ages since any of his films have been hailed as classics, whether it be belatedly or otherwise â even if all of them (2001’s Ghosts of Mars included) do have at least a small band of supporters ready to defend them. But regardless of how poorly his later-day efforts are viewed by some, Carpenter’s name still conjures magic memories for generations of fans and so his long-awaited return to the director’s chair for The Ward was greeted with cheers and with the hope that he might come back to the horror genre with a vengeance. Now that The Ward is out, we know that hasn’t proved to be the case but yet there’s still much to appreciate about Carpenter’s latest.
Set in the 1960’s, The Ward is a compact tale, leading the viewer through a modest, and possibly supernatural, mystery. Amber Heard (Drive Angry) stars as Kristen, a disturbed young woman who we first meet as she’s picked up by the police outside a farmhouse that she’s set fire to. Kristen, with no memory of who she is, is taken to the North Bend psychiatric hospital where she is put under the care of Dr. Stringer (Jared Harris).
As psychiatric hospitals go, North Bend more closely resembles a college sorority as in the high security ward where the majority of the film unfolds, a group of young â and mostly attractive â women are housed. Upon her entry to the ward, Kristen joins the artistically inclined Iris (Lyndsy Fonseca), the man-hungry Sarah (Danielle Panabaker), the child-like Zoey (Laura-Leigh), and the brash Emily (Mamie Gummer). With no clues as to her identity, Kristen also must contend with a malevolent specter roaming the halls of the hospital. Many jump scares, some of them brilliantly executed, ensue.
The sprawling action of Ghosts of Mars and Escape from L.A. (1995) may have been hampered by time and budget restrictions and/or Carpenter’s possible flagging energy reserves but the limited locations and imitate narrative of The Ward prove to be much more suited to Carpenter’s strengths. Like his celebrated remake of The Thing, The Ward is ripe with paranoia. Who can Kristen trust? Who knows the truth about the ghost stalking the halls of the hospital? Are the other girls harboring secrets? Interestingly, despite her uncertain mental state, Kristen never doubts herself. Typically in a film with a fragile female protagonist, much would be made of Kristen’s collapsing confidence in herself but Carpenter avoids that route, keeping Kristen resourceful and resilient.
As the latest in Carpenter’s long line of self-reliant, individualistic protagonists â from Napoleon Wilson to Snake Plissken to Jack Crow â the surly, uncooperative Kristen inevitably embodies an anti-authoritan spirit. Some critics have claimed that The Ward feels like an anonymous work from Carpenter, one that doesn’t reflect his own sensibilities but on the contrary, it doesn’t take much to see how neatly it connects with his other films. It may never be singled out as a signature film in his catalog but it still has his fingerprints all over it.
As the answers to Kristen’s hidden memories and the identity of the ghastly ghost are revealed, most viewers will find that they’ve long been ahead of things. But the success of The Ward doesn’t lie in whether it’s able to confound attempts to unravel it but in how the story plays out. The Ward is not a blazingly original story by any means (its screenplay is credited to the writing duo of Shawn and Michael Rasmussen) but Carpenter applies his usual no-nonsense approach to good effect. He doesn’t try to make The Ward out to be anything more than the spooky yarn it was meant to be. As a B-movie, this madhouse-set tale is a respectable base hit that lands somewhere between the operatic artistry of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010) and the FX-heavy bombast of Zack Synder’s Sucker Punch (2011).
In introducing his film via videotaped message at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, Carpenter described The Ward as being “An old school horror film by an old school director” and, for both good and bad, that self-depreciating description fits. While many long for Carpenter to aim for the fences one last time, I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Whether that’s because Carpenter doesn’t have the fire in him any more or because he’s not able to get the right projects funded, who knows? But regardless of the reason, it’s clear that Carpenter is not on the verge of a creative renaissance. On the other hand, it’s also clear that he still retains the filmmaking chops that got him where he is in the first place. I don’t know if Carpenter has another classic up his sleeve but he still knows how to put together a solid, unassuming horror movie and that makes him more valuable to the genre than most young hot shots working today.
