THE WARD
US, 2010, 88 minutes. Colour.
Amber Heard, Jarrod Harris, Mamie Gummer, Danielle Panebaker, Laura-Leigh?, Lyndsy Fonseca, Mika Boorem.
Directed by John Carpenter.
The Ward seems to be a horror ghost story. However, audiences would need to see it right through to the end to find out that it wasn’t really a ghost story after all, rather a multiple-personality story.
The film focuses on the ward of an asylum in Oregon in the 1960s. Amber Heard portrays Kristen, one of the inmates, who escapes and sets fire to a farmhouse. She seems much more sensible than the other inmates of the ward. They include Mamie
Gummer as the timid Emily, Danielle Panebaker as the assertive Sarah, Laura-Leigh? as the intimidated Zoe, Lyndsy Fonseca as the artist who wants to get out of the asylum. There is also the mysterious character, Alice, who has disappeared. She then starts to pursue the other girls as a ghost. Jarrod Harris is the psychologist.
While the film is fairly conventional in the horror aspects of the ghost pursuing the girls, the camera going up and down the corridor of the ward as a kind of motif and refrain, the film ultimately is interesting as focusing on Alice and her multiple personalities.
John Carpenter made a big impact in the 1970s, especially with Halloween, and then in the 1980s with a range of popular thrillers and horror stories. However, in more recent decades, he has not been as prolific as he was in the past, and The Ward, in many senses, is a very minor film.
1. The title the focus on the institution, the 1960s? The exteriors and the building? The interiors, the corridor and the camera continually moving up and down? The recreation room? The patients’ rooms? The atmosphere of the institution? The musical score?
2. Kristen and her escaping from the institution, suddenly appearing in the field, setting fire to the house, the police, their taking her to the institution? Her being the focus of interest? Her interactions with the other girls? Her seeming common sense? The head nurse? The orderly and his bossing her about? Her interviews with Doctor Stringer? Her explanations, wanting some understanding, wanting the doctor to tell her what was happening? The issue of Alice, her death, her appearance as a ghost? The threats to Kristen? Kristen and her persuading Emily to come with her to search for Iris who had disappeared? Their going through the corridors, the pursuit, their being captured? Her final discussions with Doctor Stringer - and the revelation of who she really was?
3. The ghost story – and the figure of the spectre, appearing and disappearing, threatening, killing the girls, the brutality of Iris’s death, of Sarah’s death? Her final disappearance?
4. The horror aspects? The girls under threat, the deaths, the mysterious characters, the orderly, the nurse, the doctor?
5. The multiple personalities, the explanation, Alice and her ordeal when she was young (and the flashbacks for her being chained up)? The splitting of her personalities? Emily, more conforming, Sarah and her being assertive, Zoe and her being silent, Iris and her talent for drawing? Their all being aspects of the one person? Kristen being only an aspect of Alice?
6. The finale, Doctor Stringer, the parents, Alice returning to her normal self, staying in the institution for some days before leaving – a pleasing resolution? The final moment of horror as Kristen emerges behind the mirror of the cabinet in the bathroom? The expected final scare?
