From the author of "The Ring" comes "Dark Water"
The film has a 15 rating and features Jennifer Connelly who you may recall from one of my guilty pleasure films: Labyrinth. I kept making jokes to myself. At one point Jennifer Connelly's character loses her daughter in the apartment building and I thought "Oh look, she's temporarily lost another child..."
It's the kind of film that has a tediously slow build up at the start. We're all very much familiar with the haunted home film format. Oh, there's a leak in the ceiling. Of course we assume it's somehow ominous and the characters are going about it like it's no big deal and it's a tad frustrating. Then the main character goes to the apartment above hers and it's creepy and almost impossibly flooded. We're about 30 minutes or so in and we're not exactly scared of overflowing bathtubs and sinks.
Uh oh. The little girl has an imaginary friend. This is never a good sign. So far this film is almost as slow, dull and non-frightening as any of the Paranormal Activity films (take your pick of any of them, they all bored me out of my mind)
I found myself a little annoyed when Jennifer Connelly's character has found out that her daughter fainted at school, wound up in hospital and was then taken from hospital by her ex husband who she could not get through and when she talked to her attorney about it he told her to calm down. If your child was potentially hurt and you didn't know where she was, wouldn't you be a little on edge?
So a rough synopsis of the film: mother and daughter move into a dingy apartment during divorce settlements and mysterious leaks and dark water haunt the building. Eventually the little girl develops a relationship with an imaginary friend.
Oh look... a dead little girl in a circular, watery grave. It's a recycled image from The Ring with Samara in the well. Let's consider some of the other similarities this film has with the Ring movies: single mother living with child, paternal presence, new home, dead child, some vague relationship between dead child and living child, mother slowly losing grip on reality, people questioning if the mother is fit to raise the child as a result, parents killing/abandoning child, hair in water, moment of pleasant reconciliation with father of child before things get shit again, dead child asking main female character to be their mother in place of the mother that killed/neglected them, watery grave with a little girl, etc.
Is that how it ends? Really?
Hmm... this seems like a less well rounded version of The Ring. As a film I didn't find it scary, it was hardly a thrilling film and I thought some of the themes and scenes weren't properly explored. A fair bit was left unexplained. It's a dark and stagnant mess of a film. This is isn't really a film I'd ever recommend or watch again. The film seemed more about a woman losing grip over the custody of her child and her inability to cope with her current situation with a little dead girl conveniently thrown into the mix. Connelly could, of course, have pulled this movie off with a very strong performance; especially with the flashbacks to the traumas of her own childhood. I think the horror aspects actually deviate from what could have been a good psychological drama about the emotional toll of divorce upon everyone involved and the trauma it has revealed from the past of Connelly's character Dahlia. Take out all the horror and polish it off and you could've had a good drama. This movie, however, just didn't do it for me.
Oh yeah, and the film passes The Bechdel Test in case you wanted to know.
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