"Dark Water" Movie Review

In an era of horror films whose success at the box office seems to hinge on graphic portrayals of mutilations, it's always encouraging when a new film promises mystery. This is exactly what "Dark Water" promises; a chilling, haunting, "who's the ghost?" mystery. But promises, promises … it falls far short of the mark.

Viewers who have never seen "The Ring" or "The Grudge" may find something uniquely atmospheric and startling about source writer Koji Suzuki's visual motifs: pools of water as a metaphor for death; geysers of water for rage; ghostly, wide-eyed children and the maternal women who are compelled to understand why they haunt the living. Those who have seen the aforementioned films of Suzuki's work are likely to find it all tediously familiar.

While in concept, "dark water" is imagined to have an eerie and sinister potential, it is squandered in this movie and relegated to a simpering, damp, pointless pool of swamp muck. Drowning in that muck is a mismatched cast whose reach for emotional expression is all too often out of sync with the moment. The viewer is propelled through a series of obvious and divisive setups, but far from building a mystery, they end up being clumsy spoilers that leave nothing to the imagination and even less to anticipate.

Screenwriter Rafael Yglesias has created a patchwork of pointless situations meant to cause the viewer to believe there may be a mystery after all. But in every instance, one is left annoyed at having been taken down a very short path which leads to nothing but a dead end. Each dead end is a reminder that this film is truly void of mystery (subtle or overt).

What damages this film even more are the unrealistic responses from the characters and the portrayal of the location. The most obvious observations aggravatingly go unnoticed, or worse, are inexplicably accepted by the characters. The result is to prevent us from relating to their experiences and attaining that sought after moment of movie nirvana in which we find ourselves magically taken along for the ride and completely engaged. For those eight million or more New Yorkers who will watch this movie knowing the reality of the location, the inability to relate will be even more complete. Roosevelt Island, which is presented as a decrepit, low rent maze of housing projects, is in actuality a gentrified neighborhood of artists and young professionals.

"Dark Water" centers around the character of Dahlia Williams, a soon to be divorced parent, who has spent her young adulthood coming to terms with the emotional scars left by the neglect and abandonment suffered upon her in childhood by an alcoholic mother. The potential for horror in the emotional breakdown of a fragile woman is often hinted at in "Dark Water," but the literally manifest phenomena of supernatural events overwhelms the subtler psychological possibilites for terror.

If "Dark Water" had chronicled a woman's descent into madness, as in Roman Polanski's classic shocker "Repulsion," the result might have been far more realistically and unforgettably terrifying than a tenement full of grungy water and possessed plumbing.

Go see this movie for yourself, but bring a towel. You'll want to dry off after this soaking in "Dark Water."