--Kristin, The Ward
Not all of John Carpenter's classic movies are as particularly good as his reputation might suggest. The original Halloween, for example, is a sometimes uneventful film full of gratuitous 80s cheesiness that happened to introduce a now-iconic killee. With his most recent movie The Ward, he tells the story of a woman trying to break out of a mental hospital with a supernatural horror bent. His film is thoroughly halfhearted and lackluster despite some of its cast members making the most out of mediocre moments in the script. A rushed plot with minimal events, low character development, and more of a surface level exploration of epistemology and mental illness is what The Ward ultimately offers.
Production Values
It is not that The Ward has lots of poor CGI that takes precedence over the characterization or themes. There is little CGI to be found. It is also not the case that the characters are all incapable of formulating a plan to escape the hospital--Amber Heard's character even makes some very clever decisions as she tries to escape, especially in the last third. The issue with the characterization is the bare minimum, often showing itself in short dialogue exchanges that do little to reveal anything about the characters, and not in the sense of keeping them ambiguous in a deep way. Amber Heard's lead role is one of the one characters to get more backstory, but this occurs near the very end and does not change the very limited characterization beforehand.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
A woman named Kristen is apprehended by police just after setting a house on fire, and she is brought to an almost century old mental hospital. She actually escapes from her room very early on, only to be caught before leaving the building--and even before this escape attempt happens, evidence that someone is intruding into her room unnoticed appears. It later becomes clearer that a set of items left in Kristin's room have probable ties to a woman named Alice whose history is linked with that of the hospital.
Intellectual Content
Not even the stunted dialogue can avoid touching on the issues of epistemology that are so prominent in the subjects of certain mental disorders or story types. When Kristin is first brought to the hospital, she is unsure of why she is there, and she is told that she has great emotional trauma, something she denies outright as she demands to know why she is being held. "How do you know?" her overseer asks Kristen, as if a person cannot immediately know exactly what they are feeling or not feeling with absolute certainty. It is only the claims of other people or one's own ideas that cannot be proven by logical deduction or immediate introspection that are ultimately unknowable or false. For peopled with certain mental disorders, this means they have more potential for rationality than the typical imbecilic non-rationalist would probably believe.
Conclusion
The Ward will hopefully not be John Carpenter's laat film, as he could certainly go out with a better fijal project. Its setting of an asylum is not thematically utilized as well as it is in something like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and its horror aspects are lacking in sincerity and intensity compared to those of something like season two of American Horror Story. Of course, I want to emphasize that neither repeating familiar story elements nor doing something relatively new isa guarantee of quality or successful execution. The Ward does not suffer because its plot components have often been used before. It suffers because bare minimum effort is all the writing and directing evidence.
Content:
1. Violence: Someone has a tool shoved into their head through the eye area. Another character is killed by an overload of electric current. Yet another character has her throat slit onscreen.
2. Profanity: "Bitch" and "goddamn" are used occasionally.
No comments:
Post a Comment