It must be hard to be a director like John Carpenter. When you create such classics as Halloween, The Thing and Escape from New York within four years, any subsequent films will never apparently measure up. And his new film The Ward, does not, but it is still a solid old-school horror film with plenty of scares and a twist that is only obvious after the fact.
Amber Heard stars as Kristen, a young girl found in a state of hysterics after she has burned down an abandoned farmhouse. She is taken to the local hospital and put in the mental ward. There reside four other girls: Iris, the artist; Zoë, the mental child; Sarah, the flirt; and Emily, the mean one. They are presided over by a Nurse who seems an extra from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and their treatment is in the hands of the kindly and intelligent English doctor (Jared Harris). Kristen discovers that the other girls are all frightened of the ghost of Alice; but apparently she isn’t a ghost, and they have good reason to be scared. So all the pieces of the puzzle for a 70′s style horror film where the girls are trapped but one of them is clever enough to possibly outsmart the evil.
