DARK WATER
**1/2 out of *****

Genre
Horror

Pop quiz: you're a talented filmmaker from Brazil who has recently released a critically acclaimed masterpiece, now it's time to make your English language debut and you decide to re-make a Japanese horror. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? You see the filmmaker in question is Walter Salles, in 2004 he made The Motorcycle Diaries (personally one of my favourite films of 2004). In 2005 he followed that up with Dark Water a film that didn't really make a splash at the box office.

J-horror (Japanese Horror) has surged in popularity in the last few years, and so has adapting them for the English-speaking market, packing them with A-list celebrities and a marketing budget far greater than the cost of the film (see The Grudge, The Ring, and The Ring 2, etc.). That seems to be the case with Dark Water, let's get one thing straight first…I really wanted to love this movie (mainly because of the lovely Jennifer Connelly) but Walter Salles and screenwriter Rafael Yglesias really made that hard for me. Oh yeah and the answer to the pop quiz is 'bad thing'.

The premise for Dark Water is really quite simple, newly-divorced mother Dahlia Williams (Jennifer Connelly) is looking to start a new life. Her asshole husband Kyle (Dougray Scott) wants to sue for custody of their child Ceci (Ariel Gade) because she's decided to move to an apartment that's just too far from the city and is terribly inconvenient for dad to make visits to. This apartment complex, which is affordable, is also a dark and unwelcoming crap hole that appears to have been designed by fascists because the place resembles a communist administration building. But something 'tells' Ceci that this is the place and that they should move in immediately, which they do. A mysterious leak begins to form on their ceiling that seems to take on a life of its own, and somehow seems to 'call' out to her little girl. That's right Ceci starts to imagine a friend, this creeps mom out but doesn't make the connection that it has something to do with the dark water leaking into her apartment. Strange things begin to happen to Dahlia that eventually drives her crazy but she desperately tries to uncover the reason for these occurrences and the link it shares with her own daughter.

Let's start with the basics, Dark Water has a few things right. One of those things is the casting. Jennifer Connelly has already proven she can act, and here she continues that tradition by creating a very sympathetic and flawed character. Her motivation is her daughter, being a mother herself I'm sure channelling that was not hard and she does a fine job. Having a character that one can sympathize with in a horror involves the audience. Additionally, the support cast are great in their own right, especially Pete Postlethwaite as the building's superintendent Veeck. His characterization is mysterious and suspicious adding to the overall feeling and tone of the film. He is slightly off-kilter and you're never really sure about his motivations. Perfect. The always great John C. Reilly plays the dodgy land-lord frustratingly well and is severely underused, and the 'where has he been lately' Tim Roth breezes through his role and doesn't really try to add anything to what is in effect a totally unmemorable character.

As far as horrors go, Salles has the look down solid. The film has an uneasy feel to it, from the moody lighting and use of green in the colour palate, to the constant rain that buckets down. The best way to describe it is that this film looks like what the character Dahlia must feel like. Salles has created a disturbing mood with cinematographer Affonso Beato and utilized a location that best suits the story.

The film's major problem is the film's blueprint, its script. Where do I begin? Let's start with Dahlia's relationship with her estranged husband. Her divorce and conflict over custody with her ex-husband feels like it was written to provide added drama. Drama that was entirely unnecessary and convoluted the overall story, it's as if Salles couldn't decide what was more interesting the family drama of the fact that there's some crazy dead girl haunting the apartment. Personally I would have gone with the latter.

There were also other elements that seemed to have been placed in the film to create drama, one that comes to mind is the brief disappearance of Ceci. Dahlia, like any mother, freaks out. But moments later it seemed like she forgot about her entirely and moments after that everything is resolved when she's returned to her and we discover she was with dad all along. Was there any point to this? Another area that bothered me was that there didn't seem like there was any journey for the character of Dahlia. There were flashbacks to her past (That she had an abusive father and an alcoholic mother), but aside from being brought up in the film and the occasional dream/flashback it never really went anywhere other than to show Dahlia as an emotionally fragile person and to have something to scare the viewer with, It didn't really add anything more to the story. I think the concept of the scary dead girl in the water must have escaped the filmmakers during points of this film.

It is not a great film and it may not even be a good film, but some people might get a kick out of it, and hey, according to the cover Pete Hammond from Maxim magazine seems to think that "even Hitchcock could not have done it better".  If you liked it in the theatre then you may still like it on DVD, if you've never seen it before I suggest a rental prior to purchase.

Finger_of_DOOM's reviews also appear at DVD Compare, where they contain additional details about the DVD release. Please click here to read the extended review.

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