Reviewed by Tim Wong (2nd take)

RELOCATING premises from contemporary urban Japan to contemporary urban New York makes reasonable sense when considering the All-American J-horror makeover. Going that one step further and taking the sky tram over the East River to Roosevelt Island makes even better sense, and Walter Salles knows it. H20 might be the title character of Dark Water – yet another Hollywood remake of yet another Hideo Nakata film – but the real star on display here comes in towering, foreboding, ghettoized form.


Seen from a bird's eye view, the high-rise apartment complex made home by solo mom Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly) and her kid daughter Ceci is just one of many – woven, twisted and condensed together like an M.C. Escher labyrinth into a tiny portion of the island's barely-vacant real estate. If Tokyo's cityscape is considered disco high-density, then Roosevelt's metropolis is strictly eastern bloc-meets-stucco beige; where the sides of buildings form rhombus-like patterns inferring architectural homogeneity; where everything is sign-posted in sterile Helvetica bold; where that million dollar view you were promised is obstructed by an adjacent row of flats. Pruitt Igoe was supposed to mark the end of modernity, but for god's sake, what about this?

Further compounded by neglectful landlords, iffy superintendents, downtrodden building construction and substandard utilities, the ordeal of moving and settling is the real nightmare at hand here. Because as much as this film trails on the heels of The Ring and The Grudge and numerous other TBC remakes, there's the issue of it being not actually that scary. At all. Not even in the neo-horror sense, where the traditional masked psychopath is outmoded by the arbitrary death curse-meets-long haired freak in need of a shampoo and condition. Kids have well and truly caught on to this, which brings us to the film's dilemma: seemingly mismarketed as the next-in-line to the scary movie throne, someone clearly forgot to tell youth demographic John and his arm-clinging girl Jane that this ain't really a horror film.

And the negative feedback has been rife. Word on the street is: theaters are being filled out with bright young things expecting vengeful spirits or inanimate objects that make you go boo, only for any anticipation to be quashed by the steely nuances of paranoia and psychosis. Of course, while they're thumbing their cellular phones in protest, some of us think it's pretty darn great: Jennifer Connelly encoring the tenancy warfare of House of Sand and Fog, followed by a little bit of Repulsion, proceeded by a whole lot of water. Plumbers take note: this one's for you.

Dahlia, in the midst of a bitter custody battle, shifts residency to the less-pricier squalor of said island. In tow is her button-nosed daughter Ceci – Anne Geddes-cute, inevitably, but also astute; when she notes prophetically that Roosevelt isn't part of the city, we know she's onto something. After getting the used-car salesman rundown from landlord Mr. Murray (John C. Reilly), Dahlia yields, and lays down a deposit – but only given that against all logic, Ceci wants to stay. The apartment is a piece of shit – semi-windowless bedroom; shoe-box kitchen with fold-up countertop; a living room that doubles as closet space. And yet within a few montaged cuts, an extreme makeover has taken place. Now, it looks homely, almost chic – except for that moldy patch on the ceiling leaking dark water, of all things...

Convention takes over at this point: Ceci sees dead people, Dahlia shits her pants every time she turns a corner, while irrationalities take hold, i.e. psychic lucid dreams, elevators that have a mind of their own, unfounded plots to derail Dahlia's sanity as a solo mother. It culminates inescapably beneath the sacrificial downpour of an indoor torrential rainstorm; sensational, the stuff of movies, but Salles keeps it grounded enough elsewhere to suggest that this is as much about a desperate housewife as it is about the supernatural getting even. Meanwhile, fear is lodged firmly in the threat of abandonment/loss as opposed to dying and all that other usual stuff; the notion that Dahlia could lose custody of her daughter the most prevalent phobia of all.

Call this psychological-does-architectural horror: woman tries to make fist of a new life with daughter amidst a mounting toll of burst pipes, leaky housing syndrome, imaginary friends, inner childhood demons, prescription medicine and an ex-husband out to claim the one thing that's keeping her sane. Surround that with the urban planning quagmire of housing projects, and you have a conceivable idea of how bad environments can induce bad vibes. Salles' instinct is to wrap it all in the ominous dread of quasi-slums that leave you no place to go. Like Bernard Rose's Candyman, it's founded on the same suffocating, ghetto claustrophobia. But whereas that film was terror at its most red-blooded, indebted to an urban legend fueled on racial ideology, Dark Water is simply about how your world can conspire against you, flood you, and drown you out altogether.