Dark Water - Reel.Com
- Reel.Com
- JAMES EMANUEL SHAPIRO
- 06/21/05
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Dark Water'She brought her own water to make dinner.'
'Her own water?'
'She said the water here was no good.'
'That's true. The water here is a little?'Dark Water is the second collaboration between two of Japan's greatest artists currently working in the horror genre: director Hideo Nakata, whose previous work includes the world famous Ringu, and writer Kôji Suzuki, who wrote the Ringu series of novels. This time, Nakata has adapted a short story of Suzuki's called Floating Water, and the result is every bit as suspenseful, gripping, and creepy as Ringu. In fact, it's a bit more emotional than Ringu (and certainly more than Nakata's unfocused Japanese and American sequels to both Ringu and The Ring). This time, Nakata is emphasizing a theme that exists (and is mostly ignored in Ringu) in all of Suzuki's works?the loss of a child. Suzuki, who before being thought of as the 'Japanese Stephen King' wrote parental guides, knows that there is no more unimaginable horror for a parent.
Dark Water's story is simple: a young mother Matsubara (Hitomi Kuroki) is going through a messy divorce from a cruel man whom she never loved. Her former husband is fighting for custody of their five-year-old daughter, Ikuko (Rio Kanno), and to make matters worse, he is both stalking them and using Matsubara's brief stay in a psychiatric ward against her in the divorce proceedings. Matsubara finds a cheap, old apartment near Ikuko's kindergarten. The water tastes a little funny, but she's homeless and jobless and she needs this place to present a stable environment for the custody hearings. But there's something that feels 'off' about the apartment. It's partly because the last child who lived in the building disappeared and is feared murdered, and partly because there's a red child's bag that keeps turning up, even after repeated attempts to throw it away. But it's mostly because there's an ugly water stain on the ceiling that keeps getting larger, and it won't stop raining outside. Only it's not rain; it's an oppressive downpour that feels like it's going to burst.
In Dark Water, Nakata builds tension using a fear that most of us have experienced: the unease of moving into a living space that has a living history. Like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, the setting in Dark Water creates a great atmosphere. It's old, it creaks, the elevator pauses for a few seconds before it jumps to life, the building superintendent is completely useless, and it seems the only other tenants the place has are two elderly women who talk to their dog. The rest of the anxiety in the film comes from a great performance by Kuroki. She's being pulled by two forces?one natural, the other supernatural?and her paranoia that her daughter will be taken away from her affects her judgment. For quite a while, she's not sure what's really going on, and neither are we. She's genuinely being tortured to death by forces that are toying with her, and the unease this creates feels very similar to watching Leatherface hang a victim from a meathook in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Kuroki's performance is subtle, and you experience her powerlessness. The bond you feel with her actually leads to the film's near fatal flaws: its resolution and denouement. The final quarter-hour of the movie breaks away from the source material; Matsubara's decisions are completely at odds with her motivations throughout the film. To compound this, the final sequence feels like a Hollywood studio's forced happy ending, which is not just at odds with the natural progression of the narrative, but the entire genre as well. Most of us watch Asian cinema as an escape from Hollywood fare, not as a way to be reminded of it.
It's hardly surprising that this film evokes Nakata's Ringu in many ways: there's a single mother, an abandoned girl, and the almost matter-of-fact presence of the supernatural in a contemporary setting. For many filmmakers, the repetition of themes can eventually lead to self-parody or emotional inaccessibility. Nakata certainly manages to direct Dark Water without falling into these traps, but unfortunately, he fell right into them in his first Hollywood film, The Ring Two. While he has quickly signed up for several U.S. studio films (including two remakes! Can you say paycheck?), one can only hope that, like France's Jean-Pierre Jeunet after Alien Resurrection, he can return to his native land and go back to his roots.
ADV's release of Dark Water is timed for the American remake with Jennifer Connelly. It's a decent anamorphic transfer, superior to Tartan's Region 2 release, but not as clear as the Japanese Region 3 release. The DVD has great subtitles, but only the Japanese trailer as a special feature.
? JAMES EMANUEL SHAPIRO
Posted on Tuesday, June 21, 2005 (Archive on Thursday, July 21, 2005)