Sydney Sweeney Antagonizes Amber Heard In John Carpenter’s Forgotten Thriller

By Robert Scucci
| Updated 33 seconds ago

2010’s The Ward (or John Carpenter’s The Ward) is such a tough film to talk about because it’s a run-of-the-mill psychological horror flick. It’s not terrible, just incredibly derivative. Think 2003’s Identity meets 2005’s The Jacket, both of which cost around $30 million to produce, but with only $10 million to pull it off.

The Ward leans into its limitations well, and it’s a fun way to spend 89 minutes, but it’s also from the guy who brought us Dark Star, Halloween, The Thing, and They Live. In that context, it almost makes me glad Carpenter is now in his side-quest era, popping up on Gunship albums and narrating retrofuturistic dystopias over ripping synth lines.

Amber Heard Is An Unreliable Witness. There’s A Joke Here Somewhere. 

Set almost entirely in a psychiatric hospital, The Ward centers on Amber Heard’s Kristen, who is locked up after burning down a farmhouse for no clear reason. There, she meets a group of troubled young women, including the freewheeling and impulsive Emily (Mamie Gummer) and the flirtatious mean girl Sarah (Danielle Panabaker). Rounding out the group are Iris (Lyndsy Fonseca), a creative type with an artistic streak, and Zoey (Laura-Leigh), whose past trauma has left her in a state of arrested development, complete with a stuffed animal and a habit of sucking her thumb.

Supervising the girls is Dr. Stringer (Jared Harris), whose treatment methods include hypnotherapy, electroshock therapy, and more extreme measures that escalate as the film moves into its second and third acts.

Kristen struggles with her captivity while maintaining her innocence. She doesn’t know why she burned down the farmhouse, and she can’t recall much about her life before the incident. But that’s only part of her problem in The Ward. One by one, starting with Iris, the girls are killed off in increasingly brutal fashion, and they begin to believe they’re being hunted by the ghost of a former patient named Alice Hudson (Mika Boorem).

Kristen learns that before she arrived, the other patients murdered Alice (portrayed by Sydney Sweeney in flashbacks in one of her earliest roles) because of her violent tendencies, claiming no one would listen to their concerns. With no one believing she’s sane, Kristen must either escape the hospital or face the entity that’s been haunting her since she arrived.

Been There, Done That

As a John Carpenter film, The Ward is an underwhelming effort. Knowing what he’s capable of when he’s fully in his element, it’s hard to reconcile this with his classics. This is where you might expect me to throw writers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen under the bus for a lackluster screenplay, but I’m not going to do that. It’s derivative and painfully standard, sure, but it was always aiming to be that kind of psychological thriller.

This is a low-budget, not-quite B-movie effort, and it carries that kind of charm. As a film from two writers I don’t have much history with, it works well enough as a straightforward genre piece that I’d recommend to casual viewers.

My disappointment mostly comes from Carpenter himself. He’s always been known for subverting expectations and bending genre rules, but that just isn’t happening here. It feels like he showed up, did the directing job, and moved on. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it keeps The Ward from being anything close to iconic, and closer to forgettable.

The Ward is a solid, reliable psychological thriller that has some fun with its premise. It works as an entry point if you’re not burned out on the genre, but if you’ve seen it all before, this one might not do much for you.

As of this writing, The Ward is streaming for free on Tubi.