The Ward (John Carpenter, 2010)

John Carpenter's return after a nine-year absence to the big screen is one of the most playful films of 2010. A throwback to the basics of the horror genre the film is concerned with cheap frights (the startle effect is employed more times than one can count), good-looking girls (all the patients in this ward look like models) and, of course, showing some blood, though not much because the film is much more concerned in making people jump than grossing them out.

(Spoilers below)

The ending is also quite interesting, especially if we consider the very last image we see. The monster (Alice?) coming out of the mirror and attacking our main character. If we accept that as truth than that means that Kristen (Amber Heard) wasn't crazy at all but made insane due to the experimental methods practiced by the doctors at the psychiatric ward. They even managed to warp her psyche and make her believe their version of the story, as has been done in the past through torture which is basically what they are employing. This wouldn't be the first time Carpenter brought up political critique through incredible cheesy films (ex: They Live).

Fernando F. Croce on the film (article here):

"... an institutional building becomes a ghastly dungeon in The Ward. Where Villeneuve photographs zones of endangered normalcy, however, the much-missed John Carpenter plays with them until the very notion of "normalcy" bends like one of Caligari's painted shadows. Pondering the current state of the horror genre following a decade-long absence from the big screen (alleviated by strong work on cable), Carpenter must decide, like Frost, "what to make of a diminished thing." So, like the survivalists and bruisers of his earlier films, he sticks to his guns and forges ahead into battle. Other than a quicker tempo, this tale of an amnesiac arsonist (Amber Heard) trapped in a sinister 1960s mental asylum with assorted kooks and one prowling ghoul displays little indication of a rusty veteran trying to keep up with contemporary fright tropes. Rather than throwing his hat into the Saw-Hostel splatter arena, the filmmaker whips up frenzies both more modest and punchier, using resourceful characters to question order and reality, drawing on elements from Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness, and tempering the screenplay's unreliable-narrator clichés with a scrupulous attention to low-key dread, ensemble interaction and unerring camera placement that's downright classical. The result is a trim, scrubbed work, as strange and distilled as a mid-1930s Tod Browning chiller, where the smallest hint of sentimentality or whimsy (say, the girls dancing to a pop song) is literally short-circuited and the mirror the heroine stares into in the final, closure-denying shot might have been pieced together from the same glass shards seen in the unnerving opening credits."