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Dark Water Dark Water, based on Hideo Nakata's Honogurai mizu no soko kara (2002) is the latest in a cycle of Western remakes of Asian horror films, and like The Ring (2002) before it, springs from the imagination of Japanese novelist Kôji Suzuki. In a sense, Dark Water and The Ring bookend a series of ill-advised remakes that failed to surpass their originals, and say more about the studios' unwillingness to expose the general public to subtitled foreign movies.
To be fair, both Gore Verbinski's The Ring and Walter Salles' Dark Water are good movies, excelling in some areas and falling flat in others. In the case of The Ring, Verbinski got just about everything right except Samara, which was a pale imitation of Nakata's infinitely creepier Sadako. In Dark Water, Salles succeeds in weaving a very human, emotional tale with a suitably dark and oppressive mood, but lacks Nakata's chills and sense of impending dread.
Like the original, Jennifer Connelly (who is blessed with the sexiest eyebrows in Hollywood) plays Dahlia, a mother going through a messy and traumatic divorce. She takes an apartment in a rundown complex because it's all she can afford, but is close to a good school for her young daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade).
It's not long before strange things start happening: a menacing looking damp patch appears on the bedroom ceiling, footsteps are heard in the apparently empty apartment above them, hair and murky water starts spurting out of the taps and Ceci finds an imaginary friend called Natasha. Perhaps because of her own unhappy childhood, an increasingly paranoid Dahlia begins to think that her estranged husband Kyle (Dougray Scott) may be responsible for some, if not all, of these events in an effort to drive her mad and claim full custody of Ceci.
The underlying theme is one of neglect and needing to be loved, which despite being sensitively explored for most of the movie, stumbles to a slightly forced conclusion with a succession of codas (although not as excessively as the Japanese original). There's a definite nod to Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) where the fractured horrors inside the protagonist's head are echoed in the environment. Salles, who previously directed the excellent Motorcycle Diaries (2004) clearly has the directorial expertise and know-how, but is slightly hamstrung by Rafael Yglesias' script, which, despite some intelligent minor additions and trimming, sticks too closely to the story developed by Takashige Ichise from Kôji Suzuki's novel. More innovation and deviation could have pulled the threads together in a more imaginative way.
Affonso Beato's stunning cinematography is superb, keeping everything satisfyingly cool and desaturated in a way that will be familiar to fans of The Ring, but still manages to inject interiors with splashes of fluorescent tube green and sickly yellow. This is in contrast to Junichirô Hayashi's camerawork on the original (he also shot Ringu) which subdued every colour except the vivid red and yellow of Mitsuko's bag and jacket. Curiously, Natasha's bag in the remake is decorated with a Hello Kitty logo, surely a nod to the movie's Japanese origins.
No-one in the small cast puts a foot wrong, and Jennifer Connelly, in particular puts in a convincing performance as the slowly unravelling Dahlia. John C Reilly, who plays letting agent Mr Murray, Tim Roth as Dahlia's lawyer Jeff Platzer and Pete Postlethwaite as creepy building superintendent Veeck are all enjoyably faultless. Relative newcomer Ariel Gade avoids the trap of being cloyingly cute as Ceci and shows incredible promise as a young actress. She's certainly on a par with Rio Kanno, who played the young Ikuko in Honogurai mizu no soko kara, which is quite a compliment in itself.
Salles' Dark Water, sadly fails to inject the horror into this psychological tale, giving the edge to Nakata's original and leaving the remake critically flawed and oddly flat. It's a real shame as all the components were there to make this a genuinely scary, intelligent ghost story.
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