Visiting hours on John Carpenter’s The Ward
**
Fast-forward 27 years, and here I am, sitting on a train heading for London’s West End. Destination: the Empire, Leicester Square, where The Ward, Carpenter’s first theatrical release in a decade, is playing its opening weekend. I’ve avoided seeing any trailers, and I deliberately haven’t read any synopses or reviews. I want to have no expectations; I want the film to surprise me. When I’m at the cinema, I like to feel like I’m sitting in the front car of a white-knuckle ride. It’s more fun than climbing in the back and slipping on someone else’s vomit… er, so to speak.
As I settle into my train journey, I flick through a newspaper, in which I spy an advert for The Ward. ‘Oh, that’s a good sign,’ I think, swiftly followed by, ‘Oh, thanks for that, you muppet’. One of the press quotes in the ad tells me more about the film than I want to know. I feel the weight of expectation creeping on to my shoulder - or has it, in fact, been there all the time and I’ve just not noticed? I might have avoided reading anything of substance about the film, but I have seen its IMDb score: a respectable 7.2, from a couple of hundred votes. I know I’m kidding myself - the snowball is already rolling.
**
After an intriguing opening sequence, some atmospheric credits - oh, it’s good to see that familiar Carpenter font once again - and an establishing shot of the hospital that, with a single camera move, tells me exactly who directed this thing, I start to suspect that I am indeed about to witness something quite special. The Ward certainly has many impressive attributes. It’s well shot; it’s edited in a pleasingly old-school manner, allowing the viewer to actually see what’s going on (remember when most films did this as standard?); and it has a haunting, memorable and at times Carpenter-esque score by Mark Kilian that also riffs rather wonderfully on Suspiria (something that Carpenter’s own score for Vampires does, though it works even better here).
However, beauty isn’t everything, and generally speaking I find the film hard to warm to. Firstly, the script, by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen, feels perfunctory; it never really shines. Granted, The Ward is a straight horror film - nobly, despite its 15 certificate and young female cast, it doesn’t pepper its dialogue with hip, knowing zingers - but it doesn’t serve up anything interesting enough to really draw me into its characters. It’s easy to watch, sure, and it’s not boring, but it’s missing some crackle, something to at least get me rooting for its central turn, something to make me care about the mystery of the ward.
Still, I find it hard to write off The Ward, perhaps because its denouement leaves me feeling as if I’d enjoyed the preceding 80 minutes more than I thought I had: a neat trick. Whether or not this experience will translate into a deeper appreciation of the film as a whole on subsequent viewings remains to be seen - right now, I can’t think of another movie that’s only really grabbed me right at the end - but suffice to say as a Carpenter completist I’ll be revisiting The Ward on Blu-ray later this year. “Nurse! The (42-inch) screens!”