DARK WATER

As a fan of the original film directed by Hideo Nakata (Ringu), I went into the screening of the U.S.-remake of Dark Water (Honogurai mizu no soko kara) with a little trepidation. True, the remake The Ring did not suck, but I'm in the camp of film snobs who wonder why remakes exist, when the originals are perfectly fine. Anyways.

Walter Salles' Dark Water starts off well, with a flashback of a girl standing in the rain after school, waiting for her deadbeat mom to pick her up. The audience at my screening was unabashedly excited to see "Seattle" on the screen. Our hometown was featured nicely in the American remake of Ringu, so it would make sense to have a, well, WET movie take place in our lovely wet town. But alas, the story quickly moves to modern times, where adult Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly) now has moved to New York City for no discernable reason except to get a divorce from her bitchy husband (Dougray Scott). I think they just moved the plot to NYC so that the filmmakers could use the admittedly cool and creepy apartment building on the odd Roosevelt Island (accessible by TRAM? how come this setting hasn't been in films before?). Dahlia doesn't know a single person in town it seems, so no one is there to point out her obvious bad choice of an apartment: sleazy manager, waterstain on ceiling, creepy handyman and all.

Now, let's get to the waterstain on the bedroom ceiling. It looks like dripping tar mixed with sticky goo. It looks like a festering sore. And of course it is directly over where any sane person would put their bed. Dahlia and her cute daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade) buck up and place a bucket in the corner, waiting for creepy handyman Veeck (Pete Postlethwaite) to fix it, but of course it is eerily low priority (screech of violins).

Wait, I'll take that back. The film could have used more screeching violins. The film is, for the most part, rather sedate. The audience got visibly restless. Not restless with dread, but restless with boredom. Dark Water plants its foreshadowing early (unlike the Japanese version), telling you exactly where to look for the source of the bad things, making it completely and strangely anticlimactic when the secret is revealed. Token distractions are thrown in, like leering teenagers, spouting faucets, and a strangely lying lawyer (Tim Roth, with an accent that comes and goes). Postlethwaite's handyman is presented as a shifty character right from the start, which is a lazy trick in moviemaking. The audience questions from the start what made Dahlia think of moving into the place right from the start, rather than slowly building-up the wrongness of the situation.

Jennifer Connelly, who is in literally every scene of the film, does do her best with the part, I'll give her credit. She is forced to look harried, paranoid, exhausted, and terrified at all times, but she does manage to give Dahlia some depth beyond what is provided in the rather weak story. It doesn't hurt either that Connelly is certifiably hot, and spends much of the film, well, wet. (Call me shallow! Go on!) But her performance unfortunately isn't enough to raise the film above the "Uh... what?" factor by the end.

If you are looking for Hollywood-style screams, skip this one. If you are looking for stylish psychological horror, you can still skip this one. For that, go rent the original, superior Dark Water (Honogurai mizu no soko kara). Because I have to say that something was lost in translation in this remake.