The Ward (2010)
(In French, On Cable TV, February 2020) I’m sure John Carpenter had a lot of fun coming back to moviemaking in The Ward, after a decade away from feature film directing. On some levels, it does have the hallmarks of classic Carpenter movies: the isolated setting, horror minimalism, subjective levels of reality and potential to simply scare the pants off its audience. Taking place in a 1960s insane asylum, it features a group of girls being picked off by an evil presence, and our heroine trying to avoid being the next one. It’s clearly a horror movie, but it touches upon women-in-prison tropes (I really liked seeing Lyndsy Fonseca in old-school glasses, for instance) and ends on a hallucinatory note. There are clearly flashes of Carpenter doing stuff that he likes: As a veteran director, he knows how to block a scene, use his camera for suspense and lead an atmospheric horror movie. Unfortunately, none of these flashes of interest amount to much of an overall film. The final twist feels overused in a genre that has often used something similar; Amber Heard isn’t that distinctive as a lead actress and much of the film is spent going through the usual cascade of death sequences until the plot gets moving again. The Ward is clearly better than Carpenter’s 2001 Ghosts of Mars, but that’s not much of a recommendation. A decade later, this remains Carpenter’s last work as a director and it ends his career with a half-whimper rather than a bang.