The Ward
nathaxnne [hiatus]

Review by nathaxnne [hiatus]

The Ward 2010

★★★★★

Watched Jul 29, 2017

Using superficial horror genre revival constraints as a saving throw against our larger awareness is a brilliant tactic and it totally works at least on me.

How mental hospital horror works, how supernatural teen slasher horror works, mapped on top of each other form another, sort-of hidden blueprint for escape into a larger narrative convention equally as superficial and equally as beholden to genre constraint rendered surprising only by the means and the velocity by which we are finally directed there.

The Ward does not care about realism or accuracy in the slightest, continually pushing at the bounds of how much we have invested in these concerns, testing their utility, flickering in and out where the margins are weakest, that being the place it lives.

The Ward is constantly in motion, from this to that to there. It renders everything discomfitingly literal and solid, making what should not be more so and what we had known or thought to be lesserly so. The Uncanny is not invoked here, but constructed, as a holding space, even if always at risk of collapse for the length of the film.

The Ward overflows with shadow and creep and the way the end of summer burns and fades and autumn rises up from deep within the earth to take its place and how that is viewed from inside a place you cannot leave, a place with screens and bars over every window.

I am in love with this movie and I consider it one of the very best of the XXIst Century. <3

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