A story very similar in certain areas to another story by Hideo Nakata, but different enough to stand apart. Using similar techniques to the Ring series, Nakata employs askew camera angles, wide shots and the mixing of foreground and background, showing normality in one and abnormality in the other, often with the horrors in the background, unnoticed by the foreground characters. The use of audio, and indeed lack of in parts, heightens the tension and the feeling of unease even more. Throughout the film a nervousness grows, beginning with a slight niggle of something wrong, building to the final shocking realisations. Despite understanding the story before the end is reached, Nakato manages to pull you on through the story, in fact, even past where other films would have ended. Acting from the child is stunningly good, as is with the mother, with much of the story played out in the emotions of their faces rather than their actual words. This is perhaps what succeeds so well, the realism of the dialogue and the slow brooding story, with a distinct lack of action. Something Hollywood attempts to recreate in their unoriginal remakes.
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The silence the newly divorced mother and her 6 year old daughter experience in an apartment block they have just moved into sets the mood here. We see how they are together realistically, that means lots of silence and little action. One aspect that makes this scary is this realistic depiction of isolation you can get in these houses. And you cant help but wish the best for the two, struggling with work, the divorce rights and beginning school. And it rains.
Water starts dripping from the ceiling and soon it permeates the whole building creating an uneasy and nervous mood that sneaks in on you and when you're not ready for it makes your nerves scream. You know its gonna happen and you get a good idea of where its leading, but its so well made that it doesn't matter. -
TransAtlantyk18 January 2012The American horror film scene has been getting staler and staler for the better part of two decades. We get the same boring clichés and jump scares packaged under different titles with little originality. That is not to say that there aren't some very good American horror films to be produced since the 1980s but the more Asian horror that I watch the more I see that they have taken up the torch and are producing the best horror movies of the era.
Dark Water isn't necessarily one of the best Asian horror films to come out but it certainly is a good one. The American remake is really indicative of what is wrong with the industry in North America. The story is the same and many of the scenes are very similar but for some reason, some intangible reason, it is of remarkably lower quality. Even with a very talented actress in the lead role it still doesn't shine like the Japanese original, even though it possesses every required ingredient. It is these intangibles that the Asian horror scene has somehow mastered and the American scene has lost.
Dark Water itself is a nice little ghost story. It is a slow-burner with an unsettling tale and reveals itself subtlety. The characters are not throw away fodder as in many modern American horror tales and there are some scenes that had me, a hardened horror veteran, wanting to squint my eyes at the television screen. This is not American horror in the sense that everything is not in your face blood, gore, and knife wielding psychos. This is a much more subtle, psychological tale. It will creep under your skin.
Asian horror is the new standard. I hope that the American industry will learn thing a thing or two from the Asian scene and not just try to emulate it so that perhaps the next generation of filmmakers can bring the torch of horror back to the United States. -
earnestjk9 November 2004My theory of why I responded so strongly with Dark Water is that it's about people that you can relate to. It isn't about a cop who searches for the serial killer leaving cryptic puzzles, nor a lawyer who defends a crazy murderer who may not be the real killer, etc. It's about a single mother who's on the verge of losing one thing she cares for the most - her daughter.
She has to go for job interviews, she has to find a place to live with little money, and she has to see a divorce lawyer to fend off her rather nasty (yet not unreasonable) husband. Life's tough for Yoshimi, and who could not identify with her? I certainly did, and maybe it's the main reason why the movie worked on me so well.
I sympathised her character and her predicament. I cared for her choice. I kept thinking, 'God, please give this poor woman a break.', but as every good movie must, problems keep piling up on her already over-burdened shoulder, and the ghost haunting that old, damp apartment doesn't help her situation.
As many other reviewers mentioned, this is not all that scary. If you are looking for pure Asian horror to scare you s***less, this isn't it. But on some level it worked on me better than, say, Grudge, because the characters inhabit this picture felt real. Natural performances from the little girl were just amazing (except a couple of spots where her acting was just little off), but overall I totally bought her character.
When she says she needs no one but her mother, I felt a tingle of sensation in my eyes - I wanted them to be together as their love seemed so real. Hitomi Kuroki, playing the motehr, nicely underplays her role - she is polite and tries so hard to pull her life together against overwhelming odds. She is the center of this picture in every single sense.
Also consider the characters in Dark Water, they are all firmly grounded on reality. The divorce lawyer for example, when she tells him that she sees a ghost, he calmly examines the apartment and offers the most reasonable advice that any lawyer would give. Even the husband, while nasty, never oversteps the line of a villain. He after all does care for the welfare of the little girl, and concerns that she sometimes doesn't pick up the child in time.
This is a sad, tragic drama that deals with the souls of the children abandoned and lost by their parents. When that yellow flashback plays on the screen, I felt more pity than horror, so much so the last scene where Yoshimi held up that dead child, maybe it all made sense.
Ending perhaps was little weak - maybe because I cared so much about Yoshimi and her daughter, I just wanted them to be happy and together. Not like this. All great movies regardless their genre constructs human drama as its core. While this may not be a great movie, but a damned fine human drama with a streak of horror this is. -
claudio_carvalho6 November 2005The reviser Yoshimi Matsubara (Hitomi Kuroki) has just divorced from her husband and is disputing the custody of their five years old daughter Ikuko Matsubara (Rio Kano) in the justice. She is looking for an apartment and a job to restart her life alone with Ikuko. She finds a small old apartment, and she does not pay attention to a stain of water on the ceiling. When she moves to the apartment, she notes that there is a drip of water in the bedroom, and she asks the landlord to repair the leakage. Meanwhile, Ikuko finds a red bag on the terrace, and Yoshimi returns it to the administrator. Yoshimi sees the creepy shape of a girl wearing a yellow coat, and she finds that she resembles a young girl that has been missing for two years in the neighborhood. She becomes afraid that the girl might be a ghost.
"Honogurai Mizu no Soko Kara" is a tense low-paced horror movie, with a frightening and original story. The characters and the situation are slowly developed, the climax is scary, but I did not like the conclusion. I was really a little disappointed, since I expected much more. However, this film is another great Japanese horror movie, the best producers of this genre in the present days. My vote is seven.
Title (Brazil): "Dark Water Água Negra" ("Dark Water Black Water") -
Director Hideo Nakata's 1998 offering, "Ringu," based on a book by the so-called "Stephen King of Japan," Koji Suzuki, was one of the scariest movies I've seen in years. Thus, it was with great expectation that I popped the same team's 2002 effort, "Dark Water," into my DVD player at home. And while this latter film may not be the horror masterpiece that "Ringu" is, it still has much to offer. The story here concerns a newly divorced mother, Yoshimi Matsubara (sympathetically portrayed by Hitomi Kuroki), who moves into a run-down apartment building with her 5-year-old daughter, Ikuko, while at the same time starting a new job and engaging in a custody battle. We really come to care about the plight of these two characters, especially when some decidedly creepy incidents in the building start to pile up, and this gradually escalating sense of there being something "wrong" with the building turns out to be fully justified. Whereas "Ringu" provided us with that truly terrifying TV crawl-through scene, "Dark Water" offers a scene that is also absolutely guaranteed to raise the hackles on the back of any viewer's neck (I'm thinking here of the one in the elevator near the end, natch). Similar again to "Ringu," a water container turns out to be the site of a childhood tragedy, and a lank-haired ghost girl makes for one very creepy presence. Special kudos must be given here to young Rio Kanno, in her role as Ikuko. Kanno is just remarkable, and surely one of the most adorable kids I've ever seen on film. I'd give her a 9.8 on the Cute-O-Meter. With an involving story, excellent acting, some genuine chills and that great novelist/director pedigree mentioned above, "Dark Water" is a fine example of "J-horror" indeed, and if nothing else underlines the importance of having a really good building super!
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Yoshimi Matsubara (Hitomi Kuroki) is in the middle of a nasty divorce from her husband, Kunio Hamada (Fumiyo Kohinata). The biggest issue of contention is their daughter, Ikuko (Rio Kanno). Kunio accuses Yoshimi of being unstable, and he seems to have a point. Still, Yoshimi is awarded at least temporary custody of Ikuko. We see her finding an apartment for her and Ikuko to live in. They pick a less-than-ideal apartment, because it is affordable. Soon after, strange occurrences begin. Yoshimi's bedroom ceiling is developing a water stain. Mysterious puddles of water appear in different locations. An unusual item keeps appearing, despite attempts to discard it. Yoshimi periodically sees a strange girl, but only in glimpses. Ikuko begins acting oddly. On top of all this, Yoshimi is trying to go back to work, and she's having trouble balancing that with taking care of Ikuko. Things are spiraling out of control. Are the problems due to Yoshimi's divorce, or is there also something more sinister or supernatural going on?
Despite Dark Water's relatively overt similarities to a number of other filmic works, this is one of director Hideo Nakata's most successful films--at least as good as his famed Ringu (1998), if not better. I came awfully close to giving Dark Water a 10 out of 10, and can easily see myself raising my score on subsequent viewings. Many facets of the film do not open up until you see them again. For example, when fact checking something about the film shortly before writing this review, I re-watched the beginning; the opening credits are extremely eerie, but the full impact doesn't hit you until after you've seen the film once and more fully realize what you're looking at while watching the first shot.
The similarities include quite a few thematic resemblances to Ringu, which shouldn't be surprising considering that not only is Nakata the director for both films, they are both based on novels by the man who is often called "The Japanese Stephen King", at least in the Japanese press--Koji Suzuki.
Like Ringu, Dark Water's menace comes in the form of a young, long haired Japanese girl who makes frequent, mysterious appearances. Girls may be the focus because of irony--they're supposed to be cute (as is Kanno, who turns in a great performance along with her more adult fellow cast) and innocent. A girl menace should therefore be that much more unnerving.
The menace is often accompanied by water. Water was important symbolism in Ringu, too. I would venture a guess that Nakata and/or Suzuki have a fear of water. It might be more impersonal, too. Water is a powerful force, both easily adapting to its surroundings and easily molding them. It permeates much of the world. As such, it's a good visual symbol for kami, which is the Shinto "essence" or "beingness" that permeates everything, and (among many other things) can be godlike, or the soul of a dead human, or tsumi, a "pollution" form of kami which could perhaps be also at least symbolically cleansed by water.
Another important symbolic commonality shared by both Ringu and Dark Water is that of claustrophobic spaces. These occur in Ringu in forms like the well, closets and crawl spaces. Dark Water has the elevator and a structure for which you'll only realize the importance near the end of the film. Water combined with the elevator also enables Nakata to give a nice nod to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) in one scene.
A further similarity to Ringu is that Dark Water is just as concerned with familial problems as it is concerned with horror. In fact, the horror may only be symbolic or may only be a metaphor for familial problems (in the Ringu/Ring films, this is made even more clear in Nakata's latest, American Ring film--The Ring Two, 2005). Both feature a young mother struggling to maintain a normal existence with her only child. In Dark Water, it is particularly easy to see the horror elements as mere metaphors for Yoshimi's psychological decline and the effects it has on her daughter, which echo her own problematic childhood--we learn that her parents were also divorced when she was young, and the opening dramatic scene of the film shows Yoshimi as a child, waiting at school for someone to pick her up. We also hear her comment that her mother was "bad".
This is not to say that Dark Water has no focus on horror. Nakata's well known deliberate pacing is perfect here. The spooky events are subtle but unnerving, and Nakata achieves some amazing build-ups, such as the scene in the elevator near the end of the film, with a particularly frightening reveal. This reveal works as well as it does because Nakata takes so long to get there. He builds tension through stretching out pregnant pauses until the viewer is ready to burst. There are many such scenes throughout the film.
Dark Water also succeeds because the story is kept relatively simple and straightforward. Unlike typical American films, much of the story is "told" through implication. As a viewer, you are frequently left to figure out decisions and events based on seemingly innocuous comments in an antecedent scene followed by relationship and scenario changes in a following scene. In other words, you have to make assumptions about what has happened. That might sound complex, but the aim, which is wonderfully achieved, is actually to simplify the events on screen. Although that famous Asian horror film dream logic is still present in the supernatural events, it doesn't usurp the plot, which continues to gradually hone in on and build up the tension between Yoshimi, her husband, Ikuko, the mystery girl, and the apartment complex. The ending, which comments on all of those elements and the profound ways that they've changed, is particularly uncanny and poignant. -
BA_Harrison28 February 2012Divorcée Yoshimi Matsubara (Hitomi Kuroki) and her young daughter Ikuko (Rio Kanno) move into a run-down apartment block where they are haunted by the ghost of Mitsuko Kawai, an emotionally troubled little girl whose body has remained undiscovered since she accidentally drowned in the building's water storage tank two years earlier.
Those who watch Hideo Nakata's Dark Water expecting a real fright-fest might be rather disappointed: it's a slow burner of a film that delivers a relentlessly brooding atmosphere, one of death and decay, but which is surprisingly short on nerve-jangling scares (unless, of course, you're freaked out by dripping water, red schoolbags, or six year old girls, in which case you'll be scared s**tless).
Indeed, for most of the running time, Yoshimi or Ikuko never actually appear to be in any real danger from the film's restless spirit, their problems arising from far less ethereal sources, and it is only in the films closing moments that it becomes apparent that Mitsuko means to do Ikuko harm (so that she can claim Yoshimi as a surrogate mother) and the real horror begins.
Although Nakata's direction is a little too languid in style for my taste, it is technically accomplished, with innovative camera-work and stunning cinematography throughout, and the cast give excellent performances; it might not have left me with the serious case of the jitters I had hoped for, but I had a reasonable enough time with Dark Water, and certainly recommend it over the dreary remake. -
galensaysyes25 March 2003This is my idea of a horror movie. No junk, no noise, no random jolts, but plenty of fear, delivered quietly and compactly, without fuss. It's the most suspenseful movie I've seen since "Ring," and I think it's even better. Like that movie, it put my stomach in knots to prep them for the chills, which rose up like waves out of calm water. I thought "Ring" rather like a Robert Aickman story; this is as near as a movie can come. The director has uncanny skill in knowing where to place the camera and how long to hold a shot. And the leading actress gives a wonderful performance. Her face in the elevator...but that would be giving it away. The conclusion is foreseeable--maybe the ends of all ghost stories are foreseeable--but nonetheless satisfying. If you like tales of quietly disturbing dread, this is one for you.
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planktonrules25 October 2013When I began watching "Dark Water" I was surprised to see that the film was dubbed into English. In recent years, dubbing has nearly died out and subtitles have reigned supreme, so I was surprised. However much I dislike dubbing, however, the quality of this dub was actually pretty good.
The story begins with a mother and her young daughter going through a divorce. Her husband is fighting her for custody, so the woman feels a lot of pressure to get a job and an apartment. While she is able to do both, the pressure only gets worse as the apartment building appears to be haunted by the spirit of some creepy child. And, thought the course of the film, this creepy kid seems to be calling out to the mother and her girl. What's next? See the film.
While many of the story elements are very familiar if you've seen more than a few Japanese horror films, they are assembled quite well. Plus, most importantly, the mood is excellent--with creepy music and effective direction and editing to create the proper mood. Well worth seeing. -
Jack_Slater9 June 2003I loved "Ringu" and enjoyed "Ringu 2" but "Dark Water" pales in comparison to both movies.
The problem lies with the source material rather than with the direction IMHO. Nakata does manage to create a wonderful atmosphere but he's got very little to work with.
The story doesn't catch your imagination as well as "Ring" does. It's too simplistic, too linear and doesn't have enough of a shock value to really keep you gripped.
** Spoilers **
I really thought the bath-tub scene would rival the T.V. scene from "Ringu", ghost/child appearing out of it slowly, but it went the other way and missed an opportunity to really scare!
It's also *very* similar to "Ringu" in basic plot: dead child, watery grave, follow the clues to solve the mystery...
** End Spoilers **
Suzuki has been described as Japan's version of Stephen King, well in movie terms I suppose "Dark Water" could best described as "It" as opposed to "Misery". -
HumanoidOfFlesh8 December 2003Hideo Nakata's "Dark Water" is one of the creepiest Japanese horror movies I have ever seen.A nervous mother Yoshimi Matsubara,undergoing divorce proceedings,moves into an apartment building that is haunted by a young girl,who disappeared years earlier."Dark Water" is a perfect horror film.It is based on a novel by Koji Suzuki,so fans of "Ringu" won't be disappointed.Nakata's technique is to imply terror by suggestion,rather than the overuse of special effects.He perfectly captures an atmosphere of uncontrollable fear.Hitomi Kuroki is excellent as the neurotic,paranoid Yoshimi and Rio Kanno is equally remarkable as her five year old daughter,Ikuko.So if you're a fan of Japanese horror give this one a look.10 out of 10.Highly recommended.
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Lady_Targaryen11 November 2005'Honogurai mizu no soko kara'is far away from what I imagine to be a great film, but I can't say it's a bad movie either.The biggest problem in my opinion, is that many things in this movie are too vague without many explanations about many facts. (for example, what happened to Yoshimi when she decides to stay with Mitsuko?Is she really dead? If she is, where is her corpse? Why nobody found it?) It's great to horror movies have mysteries, but a director needs to be careful to not let those mysteries go too far,becoming a confusing film.
Besides, it wasn't scary: I could not be terrified in a single moment,pretty different from 'Ju On'.
But there is a great point: this movie has some sense of reality,not caring to be insensitive sometimes: Yoshimi dies, and it is a fact. Nothing of that Hollywood standard where all the good guys live, and all the bad ones are in hell. Ikuko needs to get over it,because there isn't a magic potion or a miracle who is going to let her mother alive. -
JakeBrinkman22 October 2019In spite of the blatantly overt musical cues, Dark Water still builds suspense to rival the best horror films. The tension was so thick that it made the first 95 minutes feel like 3 hours, and my mind and body were begging for a break from the tormenting suspense. That is exactly how a horror film should be built up.
Unfortunately the conclusion doesn't stand up to the hype. Right when the movie appears to reach its conclusion, I expected a couple more scares and then a few calm scenes to conclude the story and wind down the viewer. Instead, it takes us down a 15 minute trip into a bizarre supernatural story that raises far more questions than it answers, all while never providing any sort of conclusion or additional scares.
This movie is brought down by an unnecessarily convoluted ending and musical cues so obvious they're cringeworthy. The first 95 minutes are very good, but not quite good enough to overcome its faults. -
In the middle of a difficult custody battle over her 6 year old daughter with her ex husband, Yoshimi Matsubara takes a flat in an old building in order to get some stability in their lives. However the problems start with a constant and spreading leak in the ceiling of their flat and the sense of someone else being around the building. Yoshimi becomes increasingly on edge when Ikuko appears to be effected.
Setting out my stall from the start I really liked Ringu and was happy to see this film from the same director. I knew nothing about it when I sat in the cinema and I think that is the best way to see it (although my plot synopsis about will have spoilt nothing). Dark Water continues Nakata's ability of unsettling audiences with little devices. Here he stays with the child theme from Ringu and it works very well despite being a much simpler plot that isn't anywhere near as clever as the other film. However in terms of delivering scares Nakata builds with shadowy images and creeping effects the spread of the leak across the ceiling is creepy and the reoccurring image of a child's pink bag becomes increasingly unnerving as the film progresses.
The direction is strong throughout with the camera preferring to turn to see what the characters see rather than having something leap into view or simply be cut to this turning movement can take seconds where our tension is build by being kept waiting. Again the use of shadowy figures and fleeting glimpses of things is very creepy and it really worked for me much better than all the gore in the world. It is a little ironic that one of the biggest jumps from the audience came from the film's one use of CGI effects, but this worked well simply due to the build up of suspense all the way through.
To compliment this the film uses music and sound very well. On the odd occasional it does the tradition thing where the music builds to up the tension, this works but is not unusual. What works better is the use of music WHEN the creeps arrive! Whenever Yoshimi looks at the leak the music gives it an unnerving quality that may not have existed with the shot alone. The simple plot makes for an effective little ghost story there is an element of mystery here but it is more about the suspense than the history. This is OK but the ending is a little more predictable than I would have liked (at first glance) and the epilogue didn't really work for me and I felt it needed a stronger close (not necessarily a jump though). I say `at first glance' because it appears predictable but really it changes where I thought the film was going and the whole basis for the creepy scenes ie I had assumed that the girl was taking Ikuko for play etc I'll say no more but you'll understand when you see it.
The cast were good. My friend said that Kuroki's Yoshimi was so sappy she wanted to slap her but I actually thought she played it well. She convinced me she was a woman going through an emotionally challenging time and was being pushed. There was an element of her overplaying (maybe? It could be taken as realism) the fear in order to heighten the audience's but really this was benefical to the film as a whole. Kanno's Ikuko is excellent I can't imagine a child I know being able to cope with that sort of filming but she does it very well and is a million miles from the annoying brats that Western films seem to dig up when required. These two are excellent and have reasonable support characters but the real star is a character you only really glimpse and the creepy atmosphere created by Nakata.
Overall anyone who saw the remake of Ringu (and it was No1 for a while) should ignore the subtitles and go and see this. It lacks the depth of Ringu and the epilogue's search for a greater significance is a little plodding and out of place, but it is still an effective ghost story that is a painfully slow at times but only serves to make it genuinely unnerving and creepy throughout. -
Inexplicable, and ultimately terrifying, events plague a mother (Hitomi Kuroki) involved in a bitter divorce and her young daughter (Rio Kanno) after they move into a run-down apartment building. The film is an effective psychological horror but cleaves too closely to director Hideo Nakata's previous hit 'Ringu' (1998) to feel particularly novel (especially the supernatural water-imagery). Kuroki is very good as the desperate mother frightened of losing her child, at first to mundane forces but ultimately to the horror that inhabits the building, and Kanno is very low-key and unaffected as her as her six-year old daughter. The film is more creepy than scary and Hideo Nakata makes very good use of subtle changes and fleeting glimpses to build first tension, then fear. My only complaint is his use of some kind of 'psychic-flashbacks' to fill in plot points (I found the similar scenes in 'Ringu' to be the weakest in the film). Although some viewers didn't like the ending, I thought that it was a satisfying conclusion to the story (although some aspects of the closure scenes didn't really make sense). A good addition to the flood (sorry, couldn't resist) of creepy kid films coming out of Japan (and quickly cloned in Hollywood) - not 'scary' but definitely disquieting.
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GreyHunter20 October 2019This movie did a decent job of building up suspense, bring out the creepiness factor, and portraying the psychological stresses of divorce, parenting, and trying to start your life again. The direction and acting were, for the most part, well-done, with the cinematography on-point.
The problem I have is that there's a world of difference between subtlety and out-right incomprehensible choices. In order to create a horror that felt as ambiguous and inevitable as the filmmakers clearly wanted, they had to sacrifice a considerable degree of common sense. Why is the mother, already frazzled and stung, leaving her daughter alone for extended periods? Why does she go racing off alone, and why, when she has someone willing to help her, does she immediately give up when he can't be reached RIGHT NOW!?! Why does a small child disappear and the police never take the time to check everywhere, including the water tank? Why does she quit struggling almost immediately when the dead girl takes hold of her...that is, she just makes a perfunctory effort and quits. Why not, once she's convinced there's something off about her new apartment, flee as fast as she can and hope that the ghost doesn't feel like going all the way across the city to keep tabs on them? Why does she do such an awful job of explaining the issues, and why she feels the ex-husband is behaving badly? Why not make use of the aunt earlier, to avoid issues that complicate the custody battle, like leaving her child alone and untended? What secrets are the manager and the man from the office hiding that they even see the growing water spots and hear about leaks that prevent them from at least doing cursory checks? Why does 16 year old Ikuko behave like she's taking a slightly puzzling tour when she's confronted with a situation that defies logic and rational human experience? And so forth.
Just to reiterate -- these aren't instances of basic ambiguity that make the viewer think. They're instances of incomprehensible behavior that make the viewer think the characters are blithering morons. Ambiguity is the question of whether the ghost was truly lacking in malice or had become something darker, which would explain why she took a girl's mother from her, or the motives of the ex-husband or even what the various events leading up to the final encounter in the elevator meant. None of my questions above fall into the same category.
It's a well-done movie, in technical terms. It's just a bit nonsensical in plotting and characterization terms on occasion. -
KFL29 August 2006This is not a story that could have been conceived in Arizona, say, or the Australian outback.
All of Japan (except for Hokkaido) has its "tsuyu" or rainy season every year in May-June-July, depending on the part of the country. Some years, there really isn't much change in the weather. Other years, Westerners such as myself start to think about building an ark...the rain is that relentless. Humidity is 90% or higher, mold and mildew everywhere, centipedes appear in the bathroom, ...ugh.
Of course if it actually continued to rain the entire movie, much of the eeriness of the movie would be lost--just because one wouldn't think oddly of all that water. Still, I think the original storyline must have come to the writer, Koji Suzuki, one rain-sodden June afternoon....
As with so many films in this genre, top marks for mood and atmosphere. One of the better Japanese occult/ghost/horror movies of recent years. -
xredgarnetx31 January 2006"Dark Water" is a very effective chiller that takes its time building to a somewhat unsettling conclusion. A young wife and mother is in the throes of a divorce and moves with her daughter into a rundown apartment complex, where water always seems to be dripping from the ceiling. Her soon-to-be ex-husband wants custody of the kid and proceeds to make life highly unpleasant for his wife. Between the constantly dripping water and the husband's antics, our heroine suffers a nervous breakdown and begins seeing a ghost. Or is it? The ending is haunting in more ways than one. The American remake uses part of this ending, and makes an effort to spell things out a bit more clearly. Either version is tragic in its consequences. This is less a shocker than a sad tale of a woman's complete breakdown. Aided and abetted by a ghost. Or is it? See this one. Then see the remake. Both have their good points.
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lv426asylum24 September 2003What a man, he has made all of the films that have scared me and creaped me out the most. First ringu for which I was compleatly unawear of the end and is probaly the most intence peace of cinimar I have ever watched, now dark water probaly just as good.
Just seen it to day at the cinimar, me and 4 other people, I realy dispare and only for a one day showing. However no talking and thats nice, this film may not jump out like the ending of ringu but all the way throught its creapy.
I loved the ending, just remembering the part in the lift. Enought everyone go see it now, its just as good as ringu and probaly every time it rains or something leaks I will have shivers going down my spine.
Forget all the negative reviews, their just babling because it does not have the ending of ringu. Its a diffrent film, same style, diffrent setting, diffrent format but just as good.
10 out of 10 -
rooee8 October 2016After Ringu and its sequel in the late 1990s, prolific J-horror grandmaster Hideo Nakata returned to familiar ground in 2002 with this intimate and very scary family drama/ghost story/murder mystery hybrid. Like Ringu, it was remade (reasonably well) in Hollywood – an indication of the central story's universal appeal.
While awaiting custody proceedings over her daughter, Ikuko (Rio Kanno), Yoshimi (Hitomi Kuroki) recalls being left at kindergarten while her own parents argued about who should pick her up. These memories inform the whole premise and tenor of the film: Yoshimi is terrified of losing her daughter. So she convinces the divorce panel that she is looking for work and a new home for her and Ikuko.
Mother and daughter move into a cheap, brutalist tenement. It's basic but serviceable. Yoshimi gets a job and soon the pair have achieved some kind of normality. But something's not quite right. There's a damp patch on the ceiling and it's gradually growing. And who is that strange little girl wearing the yellow mac? As Yoshimi seeks the truth – all the while protecting her daughter and triggering her own deep-seated fears – she will uncover the tragedy of a missing child that will haunt her on an existential level.
As with Ringu, Nakata shows his mastery of the slow horror form, and is in complete control. The frame is drained of bright colour and tinged with blue and grey, almost as if we're underwater. Forget about cheap jump shocks – Nakata is all about presence, subtly introducing us to the layout of the apartment block before planting its corners with half-glimpsed human forms and shadows. Meanwhile, the subtle, eerily ambient score textures the images rather than crashing the cuts.
The two main performances are excellent, portraying an entirely believable bond between mother and daughter. Kuroki's performance may aggravate at first – Yoshimi is all nodding subservience and hysterical nerves – but gradually we empathise. As the clouds clear on the mystery of the girl in the raincoat, so they do too on Yoshimi's really quite rational fear of abandonment.
While you can see its influence on recent fare like The Babadook, which similarly focused as much on the mother-child dynamic as the scares, Dark Water also owes itself to films that came before. The image of the possibly supernatural, raincoated child, for example, clearly harks back to Don't Look Now; and we even get a final act shock that matches Nicolas Roeg's classic for sheer, lurching terror.
Dark Water is deep and foreboding; a bass thrum of a horror which keeps its creepy cards close to its chest. It is intricate and heartfelt and provides pictures that linger. It is also, crucially, an effective and moving love story about family bonds, which is key to grasping the real horror here: the horror of loss. -
Soysoy12 November 2003I'm still amazed at how the public responds to this stuff.
While I agree that this has some redeeming qualities, it's so predictable and derivative that I could tell after 5 minutes what the developments would be. I was about 80% accurate.
Critics are easily pleased with anything japanese that uses european fantasy film structure. Funny.
In 2003, there are still people who buy these women characters who behave like... well... women film characters.
And the direction... 100% formulaic. No imagination. No innovation. Just the old recipes. I'm thankful for the sobriety, OK, but a little upset by the ripoffs. And the overacting. And the old manipulative tools. And the cheap trendy sound effects.
I liked very much the scenes with the sympathetic lawyer. Excellent actor, I'll have to watch more from him.
This has been compared to "The Shining"... Well, some can't tell the difference between fresh and canned food. Poor Kubrick!
Amenabar (Abre los Ojos), in the same genre and mannerisms, is far more interesting because he borrows from writers who had a vision (K. Dick among others). Here, what you get is the average Stephen King fast-fantasy syndrome. Well, that's the way it goes. -
db0727 September 2005First of all, this is an excellent movie. Being a fan of alternatives to the US box office cinema culture , i was blessed with discovering some awesome pieces of modern Asian cinema art, and this is definitely one of them. Most of the average movie watchers are not going to like this , I promise ( man, I sound like a movie snob ), but there is always the Hollywood remake! It is slow paced , carefully built, and unlike other horror movies , the characters are well analyzed and the director made a huge effort to tell a story , and not to make a compilation of scary scenes. And that even made me think that it is not really a horror movie , more of a human , social drama in which the director uses the supernatural element to put the spotlight on the main theme of the movie ( at least in my opinion ) - the love of a parent for his child. I mean , come on , it is so simple , the end of the movie ( even though soooooo masterfully crafted to make you think ) says it all - the final line that is. I usually do not this but now i am forced - SPOILERS :first , another apology for writing this , movies were invented for people to see them and not to read about them - so ONLY FOR PEOPLE WHO SAW THE FILM AND Didn't UNDERSTAND IT WELL; second, the film is supposed to make you think and make your own conclusions , so be free to disagree with me; and now my view - she left with the ghost girl for only one reason - to protect her own child. People , I am tired of comments like she was obsessed with the ghost girl and loved her more then her own, you now that explanation sucks! She was INTERESTED about what happened to the girl that drowned because she was in this situation in her life where her own daughter was everything she had - her worries about her own child created a model in her mind of a little girl that needs to be taken care of, and guess who fits in that model! So , knowing that the ghost girl wouldn't leave them alone , she sacrificed herself for her daughter , so she can go on with her life free of these scary things that were happening to them. She made the right decision , didn't she ? Anyway , go see the film. I don't know about the remake, but i know about this one - watch it with open mind and think about it - you will be surprised. And at the end ,only to congratulate Mr. Nakata for the thing he has accomplished - he used a ghost story to paint a strong emotional picture ( or a I like to say - he used the dark water to paint the waterfall of life ) and created a go-and -see movie.
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This film I actually saw after the remake. I obtained a copy and it was awhile before I finally got around to seeing it. I'm a fan of these ghost films from the era in Japan, but I wasn't the biggest fan of this one after the first viewing. This is now my second watch for the Summer Challenge Series over on The Podcast Under the Stairs for the 2000s. The synopsis is a mother and her 6 year old daughter move into a creepy apartment whose every surface is permeated by water.
We start off seeing a young girl waiting for her mother. She is at school and it is raining. It shifts to a room where we have a Yoshimi Matsubara (Hitomi Kuroki) talking to two mediators. She is going through a divorce with her husband Kunio Hamada (Fumiyo Kohinata). We learn through this that she has moments of instability in her past. She used to be an editor for a book company and she had a breakdown while doing this. She blamed it on the books she was reading over and over. Kunio is not playing fair and what he wants is custody of their daughter. It isn't a pretty sight, but also hard to blame him.
The film then shows us Yoshimi with her daughter Ikuko (Rio Kanno). They are looking for an apartment, which she told the mediators she would shore up this week. Ikuko is is tired as they looked at a few places and it has just been a long day Yoshimi does get her excited about the last one though. They go to a building and it looks older. It is raining outside and they meet with the real-estate agent Ohta (Yu Tokui). Inside we meet the property manager who is an older man by the name of Kamiya (Isao Yatsu).
They go up to the apartment and Yoshimi likes it. Ohta is nervous, because he notices a water spot on the ceiling. Yoshimi doesn't notice and panics when she cannot find her daughter. She searches the apartment and then goes downstairs. She asks Kamiya if he saw her and he hasn't. He does see her though on the security monitor. They aren't sure what floor at first, but the display on the elevator shows the top floor. Ikuko goes outside and finds a red bag. She wants to keep it, but Yoshimi doesn't know who it belongs to. It is put into lost and found for the time being.
The two of them take the apartment and try to bring normalcy to their life. The following day Ikuko is going to start at her new kindergarten. Yoshimi meets with the principal and watches as he and a teacher scold a child. She then goes to a job interview. It runs longer than she thought it would and Ikuko has to wait. Yoshimi ends up just leaving and we see flashes of something from her childhood. It appears her mother did the same thing to her during her childhood. While she is heading that way, she sees a poster for Mitsuko Kawai (Mirei Oguchi) and realizes that she is missing for a couple of years. Ahead of her she sees that Ikuko is with her ex. She freaks out on him and takes her daughter home.
The problem with this is that it gets back to the mediators. More information is revealed to them about Yoshimi. This causes her to break down in the hallway and her lawyer Kishida (Shigemitsu Ogi) must calm her down. He has her come back to his office and explains to her that she needs to keep it together, even when it is too difficult or they aren't going to win.
Despite all of these issues with her divorce, there is something wrong with her apartment. The leak is getting worse and no matter how much she tells Kamiya or Ohta, they don't seem to do anything about it. There could be a supernatural twist to this as well as the red bag keeps appearing, Ikuko is talking to someone and Yoshimi is seeing things. Is any of this real or is it just the stress of what is going on in her life getting to her?
As I said earlier, I did see the American remake first which I thought was fine, but I wasn't the biggest fan of to begin with. I do have to say that after seeing this original version it makes more sense to me. Where I should lead off here is that this movie isn't overly scary. It is more about the atmosphere with some creepy parts. I do have to give credit there as the aesthetic is a dreary one. It is raining quite a bit in the movie, which could explain the leak in the apartment. There isn't a lot of color, so when we get it, it does pop. That is especially for the red bag we see in the movie. I do have to give credit for these aspects.
This film is more about this unstable mother slowly losing her mind. She is going through a divorce; she is struggling trying to get her life together. There is the new aspect of being a single mother. We can see her husband has more money than she does, so she really needs to be careful not to hurt her case in keeping Ikuko. To complicate things, she is taking an apartment that is her own, but it also isn't much in an older building. She does hear running around above her and she goes up there to find the place completely flooded at one time. What is interesting here though is that everything up until that point, aside from her seeing Mitsuko can be explained away rationally. Kishida does this and it is one of my favorite aspects to the movie.
I will admit that the first time I saw this movie, I wasn't the biggest fan of the ending. It did make sense though when I thought about it. Mitsuko is missing and left by her family. From what it sounds like, her mother wasn't really there for her which is sad. Her father did what he could to try to find her. Yoshimi seemed to have similar upbringing and doesn't want to do it to Ikuko. She is really the one that gets hurt. She does still have her father who loves her and can provide everything, where Mitsuko is missing that. It is quite tragic.
Being that this is the second time I've seen this, I knew the reveal of this movie. It isn't ruined by knowing it. If anything, it added a bit more for me. Like an example of this is when they're drinking the water in the apartment. We see hair come out of the facet. The building is old so it could be explained. There also seems to be the dynamic where it isn't being maintained or cleaned as it should.
That will take me next to the acting. I really think that Kuroki's performance is really good. I feel horrible for her as she's going through a divorce, trying to make a good life for her and her daughter. To add on to it, she could dealing with a possible haunting. Oguchi is solid in being creepy. Kanno is adorable as the daughter here. Kohinata is somewhat of a scumbag, but I know that these custody battles. The rest of the cast is good in rounding this out for what is needed.
The last thing that I want to go over would be the effects of the movie. There really aren't a lot of them to be honest. They do well in indicating things from the past with the tint and the color of the images we see. I also really like the look of the building that they're staying in. It is a dreary and fits the mood of the movie for sure. There are some creepy images with Mitsuko as well. The cinematography really works for what they're going for as well.
Now with that said, this is an interesting movie here. It is a story that is grounded with a woman going through a tough divorce and custody battle. She is trying to get her new life on its feet. To complicate it there is the possible haunting in where she is living. She wants to get away, but that could make things worse for her. The acting is good and the movie just has a depressing feel to it that I dug. I think what effects we get are good. There really aren't a lot of them to be honest. The soundtrack fit for what was needed and fitting the tone of the movie. I would rate this movie as above average. It isn't as good for me as some of the other moves from the J-Horror movement for sure with the other ghost films. -
existential5 August 2004Despite the acclaims and positive response, this is a very slow moving film that has built a sense of dread on dripping water. I don't like to get wet either, but this is just silly. There are some nice atmospheric moments and the obligatory long hair, unseen faced ghosts, but this just doesn't come together.
There are scenes that do work, but the elevator bit was "borrowed" from The Eye, and the silent, quick moving ghosts are an Asian ghost story staple. All in all, an unsatisfying experience.
For better spookiness and shock, try The Eye or Tale of Two Sisters.