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Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly) and her daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade) are moving into their new
apartment in Roosevelt Island after a bitter divorce and custody fight determined to start a new life. The apartment is rundown, creepy, completely disarrayed with water
dripping from the ceiling, but, more importantly, affordable.
So they move in, unmindful that the building is falling apart except that the leak in their ceiling is becoming bigger and is now filling up pails of water. Mr. Murray (John C. Reilly), the landlord, keeps promising he will have it fixed. Mr. Veeck (Pete Postlethwaite), the building caretaker, refuses to fix it saying he is not a plumber. But there are other eerie things going on like the mysterious unoccupied apartment at 10F, Ceci's imaginary friend and her nightmares of her mother. Soon the little dismissible creepy things become terrifying enough to leave Dahlia questioning her sanity. Is her imagination running wild as a reaction to the emotional turmoil she is in? Is her ex-husband trying to set her up to win custody or is there really something unexplainable out there?
Dark Water is not the typical horror flick with plenty of screamers and shockers. Instead it provides a lot of steady chills with its overwhelming bleak atmosphere and proper tone. The story has enough nice touches, sharp dialogues and profound characterization. The director manages to give a perfect balance between frights and character study so that the story plays out its own terms instead of rushing from one scare to the next. Sometimes the treatment is so subtle that it misses that mark of a scary Hollywood remake and focuses instead in the psycho-emotional make of the characters. The acting is delivered with such finesse. However, the ending is a little over the top and fails to show how all the parts of the mystery fit together. Overall, the movie achieves some but not all of what one expects for its genre.
Emotionally instability caused by separation or breakdown of a relationship almost always
leads to borderline craziness. One becomes vulnerable to a lot of issues. Suspending first the ghost story in the movie, one can see how divorce and fear of
childhood abandonment, added to the not so friendly and dishonest people surrounding Dahlia make her susceptible to emotional and psychological stress acted out in different
ways. The value of family support is greatly emphasized in the movie.
The horror of divorce not only affects the spouses but the children as well. The tug-of-war with the children leaves bitterness between the souses as one tries not only to prove she is the better parent but also to discredit the other. On the other hand, the terror of being unwanted by your own mother resonates from childhood to adulthood. The love of the parent, most especially that of the mother, perhaps is the single closet affection to that of the Divine Love of the Father. Hence, if a person will have doubts on the mother's love and/or lose that of her husband's she will not be able to trust others, open herself and love in return.
(Date Reviewed: 23 September 2005)
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