Dark Water (15)


22 July 2005

What this A-list cast and this internationally renowned director are doing in a by-the-numbers horror B movie is anyone's guess.

It's a Hollywood remake of a successful Japanese chiller by Ring creator Hideo Nakata and it looks as if both he and his American counterparts have run out of ideas.

Back again for the umpteenth time we have haunted apartments, ghostly children which only other children can see and taps mysteriously spewing out very black, molasses-type water for no apparent reason.

Dark Water appears to have fused elements of The Grudge and The Ring and then tried to pass off the resulting hybrid as an entirely new idea. Any film where film fans can predict what will happen simply by recalling sequences from other Japanese horror movies is on a hiding to nothing.

As these films are usually cheap and cheerful and usually manage with one familiar B-List star one can only wonder how they managed to ensnare not one but five big name stars and a leading art house director.

Brazilian-born Walter Salles is the hottest independent director at the moment having scored two back-to-back art house hits with Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries - why would he want to direct a remake of a less-than-inspired horror movie?

The upside of all this is that the acting and visuals are superb - as you would expect. The performances by Jennifer Connelly, Pete Postlethwaite, Tim Roth, John C Reilly and Dougray Scott are all far better than the material demands. Their appearance in the film is even more surprising when you realise that the four men are only providing glorified cameos. Tim Roth doesn't make his first appearance until the film is half over and the other three come and go in very brief moments.

The film is firmly focused on Jennifer Connelly's character Dahlia and her daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade). Dahlia is haunted by the fact that she was abandoned by her alcoholic mother and is in the process of undergoing a bitter divorce from husba nd Kyle (Dougray Scott).

Short of cash, she rents an apartment in a run-down building close to the only school in the district with excellent grades. Having moved into the dank high rise she discovers a large black, mouldy stain on her bedroom ceiling and an unhelpful east European janitor (Pete Postlethwaite) who is unwilling to do anything about it.

Suddenly Ceci adopts an imaginary friend while Dahlia is disturbed by heavy footsteps crashing around in the empty apartment above them. It subsequently turns out that maybe Ceci's friend may not be as imaginary as everyone supposes.

The first realisation that things may not be as normal as they thought is when this abandoned apartment appears to be permanently flooded with black water. This water then mysteriously transfers itself, along with locks of black hair, to Dahlia's apartment and then into Ceci's school.

Even in a supernatural chiller there has to be some rhyme or reason for the events to happen as they do. Hollywood's current storytelling methods are to fling in the most unlikely coincidences, effects or red herrings and expect the audience to take these things either at face value or on trust - even if they don't make sense.

This is simply not good enough and always smacks to me as if the script writer has either written himself into a corner and can't get out of it or the studio has demanded more frightening moments and they have had to squeeze them to a script which doesn't readily accept them.

The result is a good looking movie which is well played, but even the surface dressing can't disguise the fact that there's precious little originality in the story.

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