DARK WATER
JAPAN, 2002,
7/10
"I'm sorry, honey...that we can't be together."
**There are spoilers in one (small) section of this review, but they are marked as spoilers so you can avoid them**
Yoshimi Matsubara is in the middle of a divorce and custody trial with her husband. She has custody of her daughter for the time being, but the final decision hasn't been made yet, when they go looking for an apartment to live in. They come upon a slightly run down yet livable apartment that is a good size for the two of them and affordable for their lifestyle as well. Goody. Of course, eventually everything slowly starts falling to shit, and that all begins with a water stain appearing on Yoshimi's ceiling. Really, you can't make this shit up.
Despite the semi-laughable premise, Nakata does a pretty good job with the film. There are lots of very beautiful shots (but the yellow tint of the flashback scenes looks pretty cheap and irritating), and while it can be a little slow at times, the pacing is generally pretty good. Like many other J-horror, the villain is a young girl with long, black hair, similar to Nakata's other, and superior, film, RINGU (1998). At the beginning of the film, I found Mitsuko (the young girl) pretty scary, but by the end of the film I was tired of her as every scare felt familiar.
The actors all do a very good job. It's a bit harder for me to judge acting when they aren't speaking English because I have no idea what words are getting inflection, but they all seemed decent enough to me. The actress playing Yoshimi was a bit over the top at times, but it's clear that that's how her character would react in stressful situations.
**SPOILERS START**
I think a problem with this film is that Nakata aimed to make his audience jump more than he wanted to creep them out. The scene where Yoshimi climbs the water tower and hears faint knocking, due to the fact that Mitsuko drowned in there, is incredibly creepy, but the second the knocks grow louder and they dent the water tower, all the tension is lost. Same with the bathtub scene that's going on simultaneously. Ikuko (Yoshimi's daughter) just saw the bathtub fill itself up and inside there is, you guessed it, dark water. She leans over the bathtub and we see air bubbles come up, but instead of doing a magnificent and suspenseful scene like the amazing television scene in RINGU, we get a cheap jump scare of Mitsuko's hands coming out of the water and grabbing Ikuko's head.
**SPOILERS END**
Despite the cheap jump scares, there are a couple of amazing scenes in the film, mainly the last one, which left the viewer with a very haunted feeling and ties everything up quite nicely, but there are just too many mindless, formulaic jump scenes for me to give this film anything above a 7/10. Overall, this is a slightly overrated yet still pretty effective movie. It's not nearly as good as RINGU was, but it's definitely still worth watching.