Dark Water

I've been looking forward to this film for a good six months or more and now that I've seen it, I must say it's a bit of a disappointment. It's not dreadful...not like The Ring 2, but it's far from the bar set by The Ring and Ju-On (the Japanese version, not the redundant American rip-off named The Grudge).

The plot in a nutshell is that a young mother (Jennifer Connelly of the magnificent eyebrows) in the throes of a divorce who has to find a new place to live with her 5-ish daughter (played well and sometimes very eerily by Ariel Gade). She has to find a place quickly, so despite misgivings, and without really agreeing with the ridiculous sales pitches of the rental agent (John C. Reilly), she decides to take it.

Almost immediately, water is a problem, starting with a disgustingly wet and drippy brownish patch in the bedroom ceiling. Disgusting water is a recurring theme in this movie: she runs tap water into a glass and hair comes out of the tap, brown water surges out of faucets, her washing machine fills with disgusting dark water.

To add to the tension, her ex-husband is pressing for sole custody, citing her mental state, there are boys in the building who menace and sexually harass her, neither the rental agent nor the building's super (Pete Postlethwaite using a weirdly unidentifiable accent) seems to be willing to take responsibility for the leaks and plumbing problems, and finally her daughter has developed an imaginary friend.

She gets an attorney played by Tim Roth, in probably the best single performance in the movie. Once he is on the case, things seem to start to go right for her.

But appearances can deceive.

There you have the makings of a crackerjack horror/thriller. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way it gets lost.

I started noting things that I simply couldn't believe. For example, she goes upstairs to investigate noises and the water, and of course while knocking on the door, it opens for her (standard horror genre cliche). When she walks in, there's about 2 or 3 inches of water on the floor. Now, I don't think any apartment building is so tightly built and sealed that water like that would only make for a wet spot in the ceiling below.

Toward the end of the movie, and totally disgusted with her apartment building, she proposes to her ex that they live closer together to make things easier and eliminate one thing that had become a sore point between them. This may not seem strange, but you need to realize that it's pretty well established in the film that he had hired the teen boys who'd been harrassing her!

The Tim Roth character seems wasted in many ways. He was very interesting but once you see the movie, you'll realize that he was just padding in a sense. He didn't really contribute much to the story.

Before I wrap things up, I must note that Jennifer Connelly continues to be one of the four or five most classically beautiful women on the screen today, and to top it all off, she can act as well as any other actress in Hollywood today. The career problem she's having, though, is that lately she's too frequently playing women on the edge and in various kinds of mental distress (House of Sand and Fog, Requiem for a Dream, A Beautiful Mind).

Maybe it's time she took a role in a remake of Hamlet.

The ending is one of those "Huh? That's it? It's over?" endings, as if the director lost the last 20 pages of the script or had his budget cut unexpectedly.