Dark Water

仄暗い水の底から Hideo Nakata, (2002) 

In 1998 director Hideo Nakata’s critically acclaimed film Ringu reignited the horror genre in Japanese cinema, and also proved to be hugely influential on a world scale. A few years later, Nakata returned to the horror genre with Dark Water, which has many themes in common and follows a similar structure to Ringu, but unfortunately, the film ends up being more an uninteresting and clichéd family drama than horror film.

Yoshimi Matsubara’s life is in a state of change, working through a divorce, returning to work and beginning a new chapter of her life as a single mother are challenges she has to face seemingly all at once. In order to start anew, she decides to move into the creepiest apartment block she can find with her six year old daughter Ikuko (quite a good performance from young Rio Kanno). Over time, the apartment reveals itself as something of a haunted house, with mysterious leaks appearing in their apartment and a worrying red handbag that won’t stay in the bin. Over time we learn that this water phenomenon is linked with a case of a missing child who used to live in the apartment. As Yoshimi and Ikuko become suspect to the strange goings on and learn of the history of the apartment, Yoshimi’s already hectic life begins to fly even further off the rails.

Nearly the entire first hour of this film is dedicated to setting up the relationships between Yoshimi and those around her; her lawyers, daughter and estranged husband. Amongst all this family drama, we are only shown the tiniest of glimpses of anything supernatural or out of the ordinary, most often, as the title would imply, of mysterious water appearing throughout the building. Nakata has clearly gone to great lengths to create the atmosphere of the bleak apartment block and its labyrinthine corridors, but it pales in comparison to the palpable atmosphere of dread that was so perfectly created and sustained in Ringu. The whole film feels like it is building up to a great big horror climax, but it takes so long to get there, with the missing girl plot so slowly pieced together, that when I finally reached the final half hour, to find it hastily wrapped up, I was almost completely disinterested.

There are some interesting effects, mostly based around the water, but so much more could have been achieved with this concept. There really only are a few pure horror movie moments, and even they are failry uninspired and un-scary. The film relies too heavily on the family aspect, which includes every divorced family cliché in the book, and presents a rather dull main character Yoshimi, who just can’t seem to hold anything together. Even the biggest of horror fans won’t find much of interest here, which is such a shame, as Nakata’s Ringu handled the similar themes of broken family and malevolent curse in a much more an interesting way and with an atmosphere so many horror movies fail to deliver.