Water Damage

Raindrops are falling on my... wait, that's not rain!  (Film Review)

by Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside: Methodical and very creepy.

The Downside: It isn't nice to people with weak bladders.

    Dark Water is a movie of small movements.  How many spooky movies can you think of that can bank credibility in its opening half hour as nothing more than a story of an emotionally damaged woman going cold turkey from an unhealthy marriage with her cherub-like daughter falling in step behind?  Dahlia Williams (Jennifer Connelly) has just split up with her husband and decides (for reasons I can't honestly say are completely above spiting her ex) to find a new apartment in the city, settling on a rundown (and rent controlled) apartment complex on Roosevelt Island.  At first her daughter Ceci turns her nose up at the surroundings ("It's yucky," she says).  The realtor, Mr. Murray (John C. Reilly), tries to downplay the fact that the whole place is a crumbling urban castle keep (I especially like the part where he explains away the lack of a living room as the bedroom being "dual-use").  However Dahlia is jobless, eager to get her life started again before her husband rips custody of Ceci away from her, so she overlooks the fact that the "breathtaking city view" looks out on a gray dystopia and moves in.

    There's kind of a laugh to the basic premise- the idea of trying to deal with real estate in the Big Apple, where a broom closet can cost you $1,500 a month, in and of itself sounds like it could be the premise to a decently scary movie, even if all the bizarro shenanigans didn't start happening.  Dahlia at first takes it as just New York renters' luck when a spot appears in her ceiling- and pretty soon a stream of pitch-black water is streaming into her apartment.  But since Dark Water is based on a novel by Koji Suzuki, who also wrote Ringu (known over here as The Ring), the idea that nothing but a work call and two hours dealing with a surly plumber is going to solve this problem doesn't exactly strike us.  I've never read any of Suzuki's work directly, however given that Ringu was a story about a VHS tape that rendered death on all those who watched it and Dark Water is about demonic plumbing, I'm wondering if he takes the old adage that there are plenty of things in your home that can kill you very seriously.

    But I digress.  Anyway, after Ceci's strong distaste of the new bungalow, she suddenly develops a strong attachment to it at the same time she cultivates an "imaginary" friend named Natasha.  At least, Natasha seems imaginary, except that Ceci sings songs to her in the middle of the night and Dahlia finds a Hello Kitty backpack with the name- yeah, you guessed it.

    There is a sense of deja vu running through this film- I'm sure the reference to the imaginary friend alone has people thinking back to January's clunky chiller Hide and Seek and the general premise when it is all said and done seems eerily familiar to another spooky movie that unusually graced this spring's release calendar.  But if Dark Water is a case of been there, done that, it is also a case of been there and done that better.  This isn't a horror in the traditionalist sense.  It doesn't abide for pointless CGI, it doesn't go for tremendous shocks, and it doesn't approach its subject matter without a sense of awe- a lesson that Michael Keaton's White Noise could have benefited from learning.  Most importantly, Dark Water builds a small but growing feeling of dread through baby steps.  When Dahlia goes upstairs to discover the source of the leak, she finds the apartment above her abandoned and completely flooded.  Could this be the work of ghosts- or maybe of hooligans who have been making lusty eyes at Dahlia?  What's nice is that the script keeps both of these possibilities open.

    Director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) puts tremendous emphasis on a sense of place.  I've never visited Roosevelt Island- and after watching this movie I'm not sure I'd ever want to.  Salles paints the entire New York backdrop the same way he paints the apartment building, a deteriorating place behind its time; cold, colorless, unfeeling, and wet (I think I could count the scenes where it wasn't raining on one hand).  He also pulls some punches when it comes to camera trickery, not trying to turn every moment into a chance to freak out the audience.  He manages to build tension in doses and slight occurrences, letting us chain them together into a continuity of anxiety.

    It's a funny thing about Jennifer Connelly- she's undoubtedly a beautiful woman, but it seems that turn after turn she picks roles involving complicated (and sometimes troubled, like in The House of Sand and Fog) people rather than roles that bank on nothing but her attractiveness.  She could land a role as eye candy in something like Fantastic 4, but instead next year she's going to be starring in a movie by In the Bedroom's Todd Fields about adultery and sex offenders in suburbia.  Here she makes Dahlia seem like a basket case (you always have to think this when you see the character pop out that obligatory bottle of pills), but she's not drawn this way for vain thriller purposes.  It's a measured performance that makes Dahlia sympathetic, even when we wonder if all the ethereal torment is all locked up in her noggin.  Adding counterweight are Pete Postlethwaite- a British actor who excels at playing almost any other nationality imaginable (he even played a Japanese lawyer in The Usual Suspects)- as the buildings creepy and mole-like superintendent, and Reilly easily steals the first fifteen minutes of the film as the used-car-salesman-talking realtor.  A surprisingly low-key Tim Roth makes an appearance as a lawyer who literally seems to carry his work with him everywhere.  Dark Water manages one small hat-trick when it comes to casting, having the young girl who plays Dahlia as a child play a second role that I won't reveal here, only to suggest that it will give you a lot of subtext to chew on when you watch it a second time.

    Dark Water is a risky proposition.  A movie this minimalist wouldn't work if we couldn't be made to care about its circumstances.  Like Steven Spielberg's War of the World, it contrasts two stories at the same time- one of dark fantasy and the other involving dysfunctional lives like we meet everyday.  It's also a welcome change that it doesn't try to drown us in the genre.  If you could think of Dark Water as a piece of music, it would be one that would never blast out the speakers, never manage a steady harmony, but would always be there churning on an audible surface.  Or, better yet, think of it as the footsteps you hear coming up the stairs in an empty house on a lonely night.  Quiet.  Unobtrusive.  But definitely coming.  A-

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