Koji Suzuki has enjoyed recent popularity through his minimalist horror stories told with more atmosphere, psychological brooding and menace than big budget effects. His first big hit, The Ring, has been serialized in multiple sequels in Japan and redone successfully in the U.S. In Dark Water, he has fabricated another tale involving restless souls and unexplained events that go bump in the night. The result, while reasonably spooky, is an adequate mood piece with a few effective scares and revelations.
Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly) is in an emotionally draining custody battle with ex husband Kyle (Dougray Scott) over their young daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade). Forced to find affordable housing, mother and daughter move into a low rent apartment presided over by the desk clerk/custodian, Veeck (Pete Postlethwaite) and an unreliable building manager, Mr. Murray (John C. Reilly). Upon moving in their drab, dreary unit, strange things begin to happen. Elevator doors close and open mysteriously on the wrong floors and black water seeps in from the floor above in increasingly grotesque amounts. Ceci attends school and begins to talk to an imaginary friend with alarming frequency. And whose backpack was left on the roof of the building? Add to this Dahlia’s constant battles with her ex-husband and her own dysfunctional childhood with a hateful mother and a father who abandoned the family. She becomes paranoid and frightened especially when she visits the tenant’s who lived above in room 10F. It seems the family that lived there had a father who abandoned them, and the mother was unable to take care of her daughter, Natasha, who is the same age as Ceci. As Dahlia fights her own sanity to discover the truth, the past will haunt her in a terrifying climax.
As an atmospheric, eerie, ghost story, Dark Water does succeed. The steady, methodical pacing works in the story’s favor. Think of horror master Val Lewton, whose gothic B-movies of the 1940’s are memorable e.g. the original Cat People. But for those looking for a shocking, intense payoff, there will be mild disappointment. Recent horror entries, The Ring and The Others have fared better in delivering the goods. There just isn’t a powerful, knockout scene or sufficiently startling surprises. The parallels between Dahlia’s life and the mysterious family above her apartment are not fully exploited or defined as they should be. The film tries to develop the psychologically tortuous journey of Dahlia as the happenings in room 10F are brewing, and somehow the two plotlines don’t quite mesh into an intelligent, coherent storyline. This is perhaps more a fault of the script adaptation by Rafael Yglesias and the source material from its Japanese authors including Suzuki, Takashige Ichise and Hideo Nakata. Director Walter Salles, fresh from a solid turn with The Motorcycle Diaries, does a decent job but takes the film’s story as far as his script will allow him. At times the film feels like a Hitchcock piece with its female protagonist going against difficult circumstances with little or no support from others. The visuals especially the water effects are unnerving at times and photographed starkly by Affonso Beato, and the somber score by Angelo Badalamenti reminds one of his previous collaborations (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) with David Lynch.
Jennifer Connelly is fairly convincing as the mother who struggles with her own demons while protecting her daughter from unknown forces. Visually, her ethereal beauty is ideally suited for the subject matter. Gade is quite good as Ceci, and we are mesmerized by her actions and reactions from beginning to end. She and Connelly work well together and do a good job of setting up their close relationship which drives the storyline. John C. Reilly is amusing as an irresponsible building manager. His early scenes trying to rent the apartment to Connelly’s character are downright funny. Tim Roth as her sympathetic lawyer is almost unrecognizable in a role reminiscent of Charles Durning’s in Sisters. While it is good support, it ultimately goes nowhere. Postlethwaite scores as a bizarre character whose background is insufficiently explored.
What hurts this film is also the knowledge of previous haunted films like The Other, Don’t Look Now, The Changeling, and Audrey Rose, all from the 1970’s. Some moviegoers, particularly fans of The Ring will have an easy time figuring out the hidden meanings in the plotline. When you think about it, Dark Water is a deceptively simple tale told with a minimum of characters in a confined setting. Like a mildly scary ghost story read at night, it comes and goes but does not stay very long.
**1/2 of **** stars
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