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Friday, July 8, 2005
Unsettling and creepy 'Dark Water' connects with emotionally haunting core
Jennifer Connelly is tender but dispirited as the recently separated Dahlia. In the midst of a rancorous divorce, she battles migraines, depression and an aggressive ex-husband (Dougray Scott) who turns a custody battle into an emotionally bruising bare-knuckles brawl.
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View all photosShe finds a clammy apartment on New York's Roosevelt Island, in a community built in the "brutalist style" that looks to all the world like an upscale prison block decorated in urban drear. It's yucky, proclaims daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade), and that's even before she sees the mold growing around a ceiling leak. Before the film is over, the faucets will spit out human hair and spew putrid black water, and the moldy leak will fester and grow until it resembles rotting flesh oozing black blood.
There is no "Sixth Sense" twist, but this remake of the subtly spooky Japanese horror film operates on the same emotional level and then some. The apartment block is haunted and the water that seeps into every corner of the building is the conduit and the key to the mystery.
The haunting is defined not by malice or vengeance, but a sorrow and desperation that Dahlia (a heartbreakingly vulnerable and emotionally damaged performance by Connelly) knows all too well. Director Walter Salles ("The Motorcycle Diaries"), who has a tendency to glaze his dramas in sentiment, lets Dahlia's torment inform the film, and forgoes shock and scares for eerie and unsettling imagery. The perceptive screenplay adaptation by Rafael Yglesias ("Fearless") gives the divorce a human face and the story a powerful emotional foundation.
Shot in an almost incessant downpour, the gloom is barely illuminated by what must be the same bank of 10-watt bulbs that lit "Seven." It matches the emotional weather perfectly, though it also tends to shroud the already slow-moving mood piece in despair. Tim Roth helps spur the film as her intense lawyer, a loner who appears to live and work in his car, and John C. Reilly brings false cheer as a garrulous real estate manager.
Salles tends to explain rather than suggest, but he connects with the anguish and abandonment to give this ghost story an emotionally haunting core.
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