The Ward (2010)

What It's About: A thriller centered on an institutionalized young woman who becomes terrorized by a ghost.

Review: John Carpenter - that's a name pretty much anyone who is even slightly into horror films should know. I mean, the man came up with Michael Meyer/the Halloween series. Carpenter isn't one of my favorite directors to be perfectly honest with you; he opts for the slow creep, the idea that tension builds to a huge payoff, but unfortunately this is rarely the case. The Ward fits into this category - a slow thriller about a troupe of girls locked up a mental facility, slowly being picked off by a ghost. Sounds like a great idea, right? Unfortunately, the execution is off, leaving the viewer waiting to be scared but never actually reaching that point. And then there's the ending, but I don't want to spoil that for those who do want to watch this film.

The film will certainly give it's all in trying to scare you.

We are introduced to Kristen (Amber Heard) as she is admitted to the North Bend Psychiatric hospital in 1966. She's a bit of a pyromaniac, as she recently set fire to a local barn - but when she's questioned as to why she did it, she can't remember. During her stay in the ward, she meets several other girls - Iris, Sarah, Emily, and Zoey, all of whom have their own particular conditions (some more obvious than others). These girls are content where they are, taking their pills like good little sheep and attending their doctor's appointments with Dr. Stringer (Jared Harris) in the hopes that one day they will convince him of their sanity and be released from this horrible place. Kristen isn't content with just sitting around and waiting, though - she makes several attempts to escape, all of which fail.

On top of all of this, everyone seems to be hiding a secret. Kristen continually tries to discover what's going on - who was the girl who had Kristen's cell before her? Where did she go? Did she get released? But the girls refuse to say anything. Kristen sees a girl wandering the halls of the ward late at night, when supposedly all of the girls are locked up in their cells. Someone even goes in and out of Kristen's cell at one point; and after she is attacked in the showers by a very zombie-looking chick, Kristen becomes convinced that there's a ghost haunting the facility. She continues to try and press answers out of her doctor and out of her fellow ward mates, but they refuse to say anything until, one by one, they all start dropping like flies.

And the death scenes are probably some of the best scenes in the film.

Kristen refuses to give up, and eventually discovers what may be the source of the problem - a girl named Alice Hudson was a prior patient before Kristen's arrival. The mere mention of her name sends the other girls into a panic, and eventually it's revealed that Alice wasn't released. She was murdered - by the other girls. Apparently she was so mean, so torturous to them that eventually they devised a plan to rid themselves of Alice entirely. After luring her into Tammy's cell (now Kristen's cell), they smothered her with a pillow. Now Alice's ghost is back for revenge and refuses to let any of them leave the facility: unless it's in a body bag. Now, if this was all there was to the film, there's a lot of explaining left to do. But there's actually one more twist to the film that blindsides you out of left field, which I won't discuss here for the sake of ruining the film for those who haven't seen it. But to be perfectly honest, the twist in no way redeems the rest of the film from it's poor character development and sometimes shoddy acting (mainly on Heard's part, she can border on hammy at points).

The film tries to grab you....literally....but never really follows through.

What I was most disappointed about the film was how it attempted to set up scares, but never quite follow through. I can understand the idea of giving false leads with the desire of catching the viewer unaware, but the film never capitalizes on any of these opportunities. This is like a thriller/suspense film that was given a horror veneer solely for a new sell value, and it doesn't quite work. It's definitely an interesting idea - I personally wish they had developed the girls in the ward a little bit more. Once the twist is revealed, one can see how each fits into the plot and what they might represent, but the lack of description and back story for each of them does little to give them any kind of likability (which is what you want in a horror film when you start killing off a bunch of people that the audience has no immediate connection to - the film should aim to make the viewer like the characters and make you not want to see them die).

Overall, I suppose this film is decent enough if you're curious and/or a big Carpenter fan, but otherwise I would recommend grabbing something else when you're looking to invest in a good horror flick.