The Ward: The department The Ward : The department
We are in the sixties. Kristen is stopped after an escape into the woods which culminated in the fire of a house: an apparently neutral and without reason, which gives it a detention in a psychiatric hospital. In particular, the girl ends up in a section (called the "Department") along with four other patients, all with mental disorders more or less obvious. A mysterious presence seems to threaten, however, and when the girls start disappearing one by one, Kristen understands that the only way to salvation is to escape.
an enclosed space is the ideal territory for John Carpenter has always been interested in concentrate its efforts in oppressive environments: the vision of the new and highly anticipated The Ward, however, makes clear how, rather than indoors, his film raises the question of the perception of a space, which can be volatile depending on the situation . In fact, the most interesting aspect of the film lies in its ability to make the Department (the "Ward" of the title) as a place "porous", in which the inmates can move freely, and during their escape attempts, uncover hidden paths and new rooms. Move along the corridors, the floors of the building and ventilation ducts, the girls are always accompanied by the camera, vigilant in the usual, masterful, trolleys carpenteriani that, once again, become the emblem of a look which becomes a mapping of space, in an altered perception because it forced a rewriting of the continuous spatial coordinates.
The viewer will thus also be forced periodically to renew his knowledge of the Department, in a game of reflections with the protagonist, who also will conduct a personal path of reconstruction of the self, until the final truth, so that repeating gap between being and appearance which is always in the bank of American cinema. There is of course an element of fun and great Master betrays the pleasure of staging of this protean environment, which produces a renewed tension along a concise narrative and capable of not missing a beat.
Thus we return to the question already raised in the past by They live or the hallucinogenic Ghosts of Mars, a favorite way to not lose the perception of self and get rid of the alien parasite that infects the body: the vision is misleading and space can be manipulated by external or internal, that traccino the line between reality and insanity. The perception of space becomes non-physical as emotional, related to the subjective condition of a protagonist who is through to the viewer, on which not only reflects the above-mentioned problem of cognition detention space, but also the feverish tension that often expressed through the film distorted the shots: these are the moments when Kristen is subjected to invasive therapies, to administration of sedatives, but also those which arise in remnants of his past, where perhaps lies the explanation of the initial act.
Despite this, however, the film does not bea possible distortions visionary, appearing instead in the very classic material and staging, according to a scheme that refers to
Halloween : The intent is to rewrite the space of a reality that is still for the most part perceived as recognizable and shared, so just let it sit for a posteriori knowledge of the lie in place. In this sense
The Ward is also noticeable as a return to the director turns through some typical locations of his films, anti-modern in a drift that makes it a pure example of film in contrast to recent trends of the genre. Carpenter in this direction was very clear in defining
an old school horror movie made by an old school director and, like gentlemen like Joe Dante's The Hole
seems to find the vanishing point in an example of the narrative material, which makes the story very linear and usable in immediacy.
We can therefore think of Kristen as an adventure to experience adjacent to the one in the same year saw the young Michael Myers hatch his madness under the watchful eye of Dr. Loomis in another psychiatric hospital: the bottom is limit is again a foundational period of the loss of innocence, as happened with the Sixties masterpiece of repressed Elvis and of the newly cited Halloween, up to the future / past array of western Ghosts from Mars and Fifties of Christine .
In all these cases is the common matrix of travel (on) a protagonist who must be conscious and aware of this lack of experience himself and his innocence, learning to introflex believed that evil come from outside. The ghosts, in fact, are once again the same.
The Ward: The department
(The Ward)
Director: John Carpenter
Screenplay: Michael Rasmussen and Shawn
Source: U.S. 2010
Length: 88 '
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