I was skeptical about the Japanese horror film remake "Dark Water" even before the opening credits rolled. The trailers I had seen featured torrential downpours of murky water and Oscar-winner Jennifer Connelly wading through dark pools in abandoned apartments. I was cynical about the horrors that copious amounts of water could instill in any audience but was willing to give director Walter Salles, known for directing the beautiful film "The Motorcycle Diaries," a chance.
The film opens with a rainy scene of a young Dahlia (Perla Haney-Jardine), depicted as a surprisingly unattractive child, waiting for her unreliable alcoholic mother to pick her up from school. The scene is filmed in the same grainy, haunting cinematography as "The Motorcycle Diaries," and for a moment I had hopes that the entire movie would be filmed the same way. After the first flashback, though, the movie is filmed in a more modern style, and there were numerous more disappointments after that.
The film revolves around mother-daughter relationships, and there were points when the movie shined in depicting the tenderness between Dahlia (played as an adult by Jennifer Connelly) and her daughter. For example, the banter and dialogue between Dahlia and her charming, doe-eyed daughter, Ceci, is believable and brings an ease to the beginning of the film. Yet the movie is heavily based on Dahlia's broken past and dysfunctional, scarring relationship with her mother -- neither of which receive much attention or explanation in the film.
Jennifer Connelly is hauntingly beautiful and fragile -- one just wants to save her from the pond of an apartment she lives in and her oppressive circumstances. She is recently estranged from her husband, Ceci's father, who is sending lawyers after her and demanding that she move to Jersey City, where he is living with a new woman. Instead, Dahlia agrees to rent a depressing apartment on New York's Roosevelt Island at the strange, desperate urgings of Ceci. Minutes after they arrive, Ceci tells her mother that she hates the apartment complex. As if immediately possessed by some sort of demon, Ceci propels the movie's first hour as we see her character change the apartment ceiling continues its sinister leak.
Indeed, the movie fulfills all requirements for a scary movie, including random, grim characters that cross Dahlia's path briefly -- even a quick exchange with a redheaded tenant in the elevator can be construed as threatening. The movie features an all-star cast, with Camryn Manheim as Ceci's schoolteacher, Dougray Scott as Dahlia's ex-husband, and Pete Postlethwaite as the leering superintendent. The leaky ceiling and brown water deserve credit as well, since the film is soaked; every other scene features rain or uncontrollable, dirty water leaking, flooding, and spraying at the characters.
Yet Dahlia's helplessness and fragility can only sustain her as a character for so long, and by midway through the film, we wonder why she doesn't take back her security deposit and march from the obviously haunted apartment, Ceci in tow, to the nearest Holiday Inn. She talks on the phone to someone we assume is a close friend or relative, yet she never asks for help or money to escape her situation. Her ex-husband accuses her of being a bad parent, and despite our sympathy for her, she is, simply because she lets her daughter stay in such a physically and emotionally stressing situation
"Dark Water" has chances to truly scare its audience, and when the ghost of the little girl upstairs, Natasha -- who is played by the same actress who depicts young Dahlia -- begins to wreak havoc on the family, we begin to feel a little dread or stirrings of fear. There are a few frightening scenes with the conventional devices of substituting Natasha's face for Ceci's or showing a dead body, yet Salles fails to capitalize on the film's fright potential. By the end, the repeated appearances of the ghostly girl upstairs become as exasperating as the puddles of water that are supposed to instill fear of the supernatural but only inspires a fear of mildew.
It was as if Salles took every cliche in the horror movie handbook and decided to throw them into a movie held together by Connelly's acting skills. Creepy little girls? Check -- although I'm sure the dead little girl under the table in "The Sixth Sense" and the little girl in "The Ring" have beaten this cliche to death. Eerie singing of nursery rhymes by young children? Check -- in this case, "The Itsy Bitsy Spider," although I'm sure "Humpty Dumpty" and "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" will soon have their turns as well. Melancholy, isolated woman wandering into dark, abandoned apartment rooms alone? Check, once again.
Instead, the film degenerates into a collage of scenes and false endings that are probably meant to surprise and unsteady the audience, but instead serve to confuse and exasperate us. Fading in and out of its final scenes, "Dark Water" attempts to end as a classic ghost story, but its patchwork ending leaves an unfinished -- and undisturbed -- feeling in the viewer's mind. It is less a "psychological thriller" and more a "psychological drama" that sinks under the weight of its horror movie conventions.
