The Ward

Director: John Carpenter
Starring: Amber Heard, Jared Harris, Lyndsy Fonseca
Time Out rating:

The title is marketing 101: how to sell a schlocky, throwback genre picture on the back of the past glories of a director who once dealt solely in amped-up, literate and ballsy entertainment such as The Thing, They Live and Halloween? This latest effort – arriving nine years after his previous lame duck, The Ghosts of Mars – has a superbly designed opening title sequence, with sinister images refracted in cracked glass. But it’s swiftly downhill from there, as we’re given a panache-free, ’60s-set thriller involving a gang of teenage girls locked up in a psych ward for reasons unknown. Feisty Kristen (Amber Heard) is the newest inmate and makes the strongest effort to discover why a creepy quack (Jared Harris) is keeping them there. There are a few scares, but beside the fact that it’s all totally illogical and the girls seem able to escape from their high-security block at will, the film doesn’t have anything important or timely to say about youth, medicine, post-traumatic stress or anything. Just don’t call it a comeback. No seriously, don’t.

The Ward opens at select Tokyo cinemas on September 17