I found Dark Water slow and gloomy, with a lengthy buildup to a less-than-satisfying conclusion.
Tools:
Recommend review to a friend »
Maybe if "Dark Water" had appeared, say, five years earlier, it would have made a bigger impact; but as it is, the story of a beautiful divorced woman, her strange little girl, some mysterious dripping water, and the possibility of ghosts sounds awfully familiar. I suppose we should expect a feeling of deja vu, given that this 2005 release comes from the same novelist, Koji Suzuki, who penned "The Ring" and "The Ring 2" several years earlier, and that it's a remake of a Japanese picture. Any similarity among the stories is not purely coincidental.
Frankly, I looked forward to something more, something better, from Suzuki and from screenwriter Rafael Yglesias ("From Hell") and director Walter Salles ("The Motorcycle Diaries"), all writers and filmmakers whose previous work I had liked a lot. Instead, I found "Dark Water" slow and gloomy, with a lengthy buildup to a less-than-satisfying conclusion. Indeed, it seems as though the film is all buildup, and if that's the route the filmmakers wanted to take, it's OK with me, but they might have made it pay off more suitably for the all the time and trouble they put one through. With this film, the screenplay practically telegraphs the ending an hour ahead of time, and to our dismay it's just as mundane as we'd worried it might be. In this regard, think of Robert De Niro's "Hide and Seek," but without so much silly, violent behavior.
The "Dark Water" plot centers almost entirely on one woman, Dahlia Williams (Jennifer Connelly), a newly divorced mother, who with her young daughter, Ceci (Ariel Gade), moves into a large apartment complex announced as thirty-odd years old (about the same age as Dahlia, a coincidence lost on me). Dahlia and Ceci move into the ninth floor of the ten-story central building and immediately begin to experience weird occurrences. First, the floor above theirs begins to drip water. Constantly. Then, they hear noises from upstairs, from an apartment whose occupants, two parents and a little girl about Ceci's age, are supposedly "away." After that, Ceci starts playing with an imaginary, invisible friend.
Meanwhile, the ex-husband, Kyle (Dougray Scott), tries to make Dahlia move closer to where he lives so he can see his daughter more conveniently, insisting to the divorce mediators that Dahlia is "crazy," "insane," inhabiting a world of her own. Well, Dahlia is certainly troubled. She's recently divorced; she's in a goofy, drippy, noisy apartment building; she gets migraine headaches; she has nightmares; and she has her own tormented past to contend with, a past that includes a mother who was unappreciative and a father who abandoned her. So, are the problems she's experiencing now merely figments of her fevered imagination, is she going crazy as her ex-husband claims, or is the building really haunted?
Dahlia's distress is compounded by the fact that she does not appear to have any close friends or relatives, no one to turn to. The apartment landlord, Mr. Murray (John C. Reilly), is of little help to her, passing the buck at every turn. The building superintendent, Mr. Veeck (Pete Postlethwaite), is even less helpful, being grumpy, noncommunicative, and not a little lazy. And the father is no help whatsoever, wanting only to arrange Dahlia's life for his own comfort, going so far as to hire a lawyer to get the woman to move closer to where he lives.
To defend herself, Dahlia hires her own lawyer, Jeff Platzer (Tim Roth), probably the most enigmatic character in the film. The credits list Roth third, but he has very little screen time and enters the picture about halfway through. He seems to be the only person who cares at all about Dahlia, but, then, he's being paid to care. He works out of his car, saying his office is being painted. And when Dahlia calls him one evening for advice, he tells her he's busy with his family when, in reality, he's alone. The movie leads us to believe that something will come of this character, perhaps a love interest, yet nothing does. It's as if the scriptwriter had wanted to develop him in some way but because of time or money, he had to leave the characterization unfinished.
Nothing about the film seems to go anywhere. Despite some fine performances, "Dark Water" gets depressing fast, especially with the claustrophobic apartment-house sets, the constant drips, and the incessant rain. It's atmospheric, to be sure, but that's about all it is, only in the last ten minutes or so coming even remotely close to anything scary; yet even here it's more weird than shocking or frightening. In the meantime, we wait for the big payoff that never comes.
Average user rating (1-5):
Not yet rated.
Not yet rated.
[release]16853[/release]