The Ward (2010)
The Ward (2010) – This movie has a “twist” ending and you can guess it pretty much from the beginning. I rolled my eyes and said “aw, man, in the end it’s going to turn out [REDACTED].” Surely enough it did turn out [REDACTED] but I didn’t mind so much as my eye-rolling predictions would seem to indicate. I actually read somewhere recently that a recent study found that people tend to enjoy stories MORE when they know the ending. Now I’d rather be caught off guard by a good twist (as I was with The Sixth Sense and Fight Club) but I can certainly see the point. The Ward is more about atmosphere than about story.
Amber Heard (Pineapple Express, The Informers) plays Kristen, an amnesiac committed to a mental institution after committing an arson in 1966. Her fellow inmates include the strong Emily (Mamie Gummer, Meryl Streep’s daughter), the flirtatious Sarah (Danielle Panabaker from Friday the 13th and The Crazies), the childlike Zoey (Laura-Leigh from… um… stuff?), and the kind and artistic Iris (Lyndsey Fonseca from Kick-Ass and How I Met Your Mother). A couple of girls have disappeared from the tiular ward and Kristen is hell-bent on escape, despite the good intentions of her doctor (Jared Harris from Mad Men and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). I’m betting you might already have a fair idea what the plot twist is just from reading the summary. It doesn’t matter. John Carpenter brings style and jumps to the predictable story and you remember why people consider him a master of the genre. It doesn’t rank alongside his all-time classics like Escape from New York or The Thing, but it is an entertaining horror flick.
Persistence of Vision 