Review: 'Dark Water' spooky from start
By Christy Lemire
The Associated Press
Friday, July 8, 2005; Posted: 2:01 p.m. EDT (18:01 GMT)
Just when you thought it was safe to turn on the faucet comes "Dark Water," a thriller brave enough to tackle a subject that plagues every New Yorker at some time or another: bad plumbing.
We kid. It's actually better than it sounds. In the canon of recent scary movies of Japanese origin -- or J-horror flicks, for those of you in the know -- "Dark Water" is more deeply disturbing than the laughable remake of "The Ring" or "The Grudge," which was oddly antiseptic.
"Dark Water" falls into this category since it's based on a hit Japanese film directed by "Ringu" director Hideo Nakata, which itself was based on a short story by Koji Suzuki, who also wrote the novel "The Ring." And if you're a fan of the genre, you'll be happy to see that all the requisite ideas and images are represented. Water as a symbol of death. Cold, gray surroundings. A creepy little girl with long, dark hair.
The difference here is the pedigree: It's flawless from top to bottom. Jennifer Connelly, John C. Reilly and Tim Roth are among its stars. Brazil's Walter Salles ("The Motorcycle Diaries") is the director. Affonso Beato ("All About My Mother") is the cinematographer. Longtime David Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti composed the score.
These are people who know how to create a mood, one that's inescapably spooky from the first frame. No big, fast scares here. Just a slow, steady boil.
But there's also nothing you haven't seen before. Glimmers of iconic horror movies like "The Shining" and "The Sixth Sense" are evident, as well as the far less effective "Hide and Seek" with Robert De Niro and Dakota Fanning.
"Do you have an invisible friend only you can see?" Connelly's character, Dahlia Williams, asks her daughter, Ceci (6-year-old Ariel Gade, whose dark hair and almond-shaped eyes could make her Connelly's daughter in real life, and whose poise makes her Connelly's equal on screen).
Dahlia and Ceci have moved into a cheap apartment on Roosevelt Island in a complex that could be a converted psychiatric hospital, with its bleak lighting, cinderblock walls and rumbling elevator. (Reilly, perfect as the falsely perky real estate broker, euphemistically describes their unit as being on the "lower penthouse level.")
And then there's the dripping water -- nearly constant and all over the building, but mostly in the bedroom Dahlia and Ceci share, plopping in gloopy puddles from apartment 10F above them. It's shot so viscerally, you can almost smell the musty, moldy odor.
All this is happening as Dahlia is in the midst of a bitter divorce and custody battle with Ceci's father (Dougray Scott). So when Dahlia learns from Ceci's teacher (Camryn Manheim) that her daughter has been talking to an imaginary friend named Natasha instead of playing with real kids at her new school, it seems normal. Children seek such methods of escape during times of crisis. No biggie.
But then the water becomes more insistent, as does the voice in Ceci's head, and eventually Dahlia starts hearing and seeing things, too. Is she going mad? Is she reliving abandonment issues from her own childhood? Did something horrible happen in 10F? Or is it just old, faulty plumbing? (Roth is nearly unrecognizable and dryly funny as Dahlia's lawyer, who helps her learn the truth about the building, even though he has secrets of his own.)
J-horror fans will figure out pretty quickly what's really happening here. For everyone else, there is a palpable sense of suspense as the film reaches its climactic revelations.
Connelly, an Oscar winner for "A Beautiful Mind," adds weight and realism to a role that could have been just another wide-eyed, shrieking damsel in distress. Every emotion -- from fear to determination -- flashes vividly across her strikingly clear features.
Too bad Hitchcock liked those icy blondes. If she'd been around 40 years ago, you could imagine Connelly ducking deadly birds instead of menacing drops of water.
