It was a very long day. I was tired, Amazon suggested The Ward, and I thought, ok, sure Amazon, why not. John Carpenter, a psychiatric hospital in 1966,  a ghost haunting the patients; it seemed like a probably-maybe-okay way to spend ninety minutes before bed.

It initially seemed promising: Kristen (Amber Heard, about whom I have heard a lot of things, but I have never actually seen her act) is committed after burning down a farmhouse and finds herself in a ward with four other young women, all being terrorized by the ghost of a former patient. The ghost itself is oddly physical for a ghost…you can punch it, push it around, fight it off in ways that feel odd for a supernatural entity. The other patients are all broad-stroke archetypes: the baby, the artist, the sexy one, the prankster. Nobody feels like an actual person with any depth. The acting across the board is pretty flat, with all the characters being one-note and not quite landing. The guy who plays Mycroft Holmes seems to be slumming it here as the head psychiatrist.

This didn’t feel much like the John Carpenter I’m familiar with. Where’s the atmosphere? The dread? Until I got to the ending, I kept thinking this would have worked better as a book. But then there’s a twist that recontextualizes everything, and I’m not sure how you’d pull that off on the page. I’m also not sure the twist makes the movie better, exactly, but it does make certain choices make more sense in retrospect. Maybe I’m cutting it too much slack here, but the weirdness of the ghost being so physical, the cardboard cutout characters, I think there was actually a reason for all of that. I can’t say what without spoiling it, but once you know, you understand why things feel off. But whether that understanding improves the experience is debatable.

What I can’t get past, though, is Amber Heard’s perfectly maintained bright blonde roots. For someone who’s supposedly been on the run and then locked in a psychiatric hospital, her hair looks remarkably salon-fresh.

It’s not terrible. It’s just not particularly memorable either. A neat idea that doesn’t quite come together, even with the twist doing some heavy lifting at the end.

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