CS Weekly Archive > Weekend Read > 7/08/05

Drip Dry

By joshua tyler

Screenwriter Rafael Yglesias brings another Japanese horror movie into the American mainstream, only this time the ghosts are making themselves known by clogging up a single mother's toilet. Dark Water goes for dripping ceilings and flooded apartments in a horror film so not scary that it ought to be distributed by Disney…oh wait, it is.

Dark Water

Rafael Yglesias
Based on a film by Hideo Nakata

Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly) is a soon-to-be divorced mother starting a new life with her daughter in a run-down apartment building. Dahlia likes the place because the schools are good and the rent is cheap, her daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade) likes it because unbeknownst to her mom the plumbing's full of evil, vengeful spirits. When the ceiling in Ceci's bedroom starts leaking brackish water and Dahlia starts having terrible abandonment nightmares involving her own mother, Rafael Yglesias's script takes the tension up a notch by having Dahlia hire a lawyer (Tim Roth). The leak in Ceci's ceiling grows progressively worse, and though we are no doubt to assume the supernatural is to blame, the film never gives us enough concrete cause to do so. Since ghosts don't happen naturally, the script spends a lot of time hinting at a reason for this particular one to do so much flooding. Meanwhile Ceci, as so many children do, develops an imaginary friend whom we all know is not imaginary, since we've seen this type of movie before.

Like many modern PG-13 horror movies, Dark Water is a remake; in this case, the original Japanese movie was written by Takashige Ichise and Hideo Nakata, creator of the Ring film franchise. The problem with Dark Water is that dirty water just isn't terrifying, no matter how hard the screenplay by Yglesias (Fearless, From Hell) tries. Add to that a script that is simply too derivative, and plays like a less scary rehash of this year's other failed Nakata product, The Ring Two, and you leave the theater glad that the filmmakers resisted the temptation to have a ghostly Goth chick climb out of an overflowing toilet.

Like most modern PG-13 horror movies, Dark Water is a remake. The original Japanese movie this one is based on was written by Takashige Ichise and Hideo Nakata, whom you may recall as the originator of Hideo, it seems, has an obsession with finding fear in mundane home conveniences. In The Ring series, he tried to make us all want to throw holy water on our VCRs; now holy water is of no use since it's the liquids coming out of our bathroom faucets that are causing trouble. The problem here is that dirty water just isn't terrifying, no matter how hard Yglesias' screenplay tries to make it appear twisted. The script is simply too derivative and plays like a less-scary rehash of this year's other failed Nakata product At least Dark Water resists the temptation to have a ghostly Goth chick climb out of an overflowing toilet.

Eventually, the script gives up and resolves itself rather abruptly, flushing to a resolution that hasn't been properly foreshadowed by the slow drip of the rest of the script. While Yglesias deserves some credit for sticking with a less than happy ending, it's so out of character with the rest of this tepid movie that it's easy to finish and forget that anything bad ever happened.

Dark Water takes forever to push beyond the level of a petulant steady leak, and the script fails to achieve the slow-burning tension necessary to really hook an audience in to this wannabe thriller.

Dark Water
Touchstone Pictures
Rated PG-13; 111 min.

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Joshua Tyler writes about movies as Editor-in-Chief of CinemaBlend.com and in free newspapers around the country. He has never won an award and would probably be suspicious if he did.

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