Carpenter: The Ward (2010)

The Ward is John Carpenter’s first film since Ghosts of Mars, but it’s utterly unlike it in spirit. Set in the remote ward of a 1960s psychiatric institute, it’s similar in tone and style to his earliest features, so it’s immediately noticeable that it’s not also written by Carpenter – a disparity that he addresses by turning the ward itself into the screenplay he might have written, continually drifting away from unnecessary exposition to dwell on its recesses and reticulations. This is a good space for Carpenter – as a director whose horror depended precisely on the dissolution of the spatio-temporal strictures of conventional suspense, a dissolution that has now become commonplace, a period space like the ward provides him with a way to both historicise and revisit his legacy, especially given the more recent fetish for the 1960s and 1970s (among other things, the film reimagines Mad Men as a horror film, right down to Jared Harris as a reincarnated Donald Pleasance). And Carpenter beautifully elaborates every space between the ward and the front door – in many ways, it works better as one of his escape films than one of his horror films, a minutely gradated series of thresholds and chambers – making for some quite magical emergences of fully-fledged Carpenter architectonics. In addition, the transition to Super 35 film stock creates a whole new series of anamorphic possibilities, which Carpenter exploits by alternating glacial, extended zooms with extravagant tracking shots – either the walls are imperceptibly, subliminally closing in, or we’re wheeling around corners, down corridors and up stairwells, tracking out the contours of a space that’s not meant to be moved through at all, let alone so effortlessly and flamboyantly.