REVIEWED - DARK WATER: Donald Clark finds an atmospheric Japanese remake frustratingly unresolved
oNe of the studio's taglines for Walter Salles's impressively dank adaptation of Hideo Nakata's fine Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara warns us that "some mysteries were never meant to be solved". Another suggests that "dark water conceals darker secrets". The message is clear. Do not expect Dark Water to end with the villain explaining his diabolical scheme as he lashes the hero to the railway tracks. The new film may tidy away a few of the original's dangling threads, but it remains more an exercise in atmosphere than a conventional piece of storytelling.
But what atmosphere. Filmed amid the grimly brutalist architecture of New York's Roosevelt Island, Dark Water follows the decline of a recently separated mother as she moves into a suspiciously affordable apartment with her young daughter. On her first night in the new home she notices a patch of damp on the ceiling. What on earth is she worrying about? Everything in Dark Water's universe seems to be wet or green. (Or both. If the picture were a house paint it would be called Moist Olive.) It rains constantly. The flat upstairs becomes flooded. The water tower on the roof drips ominously. Even Jennifer Connelly, who plays the lead with characteristic solemnity, seems to have gone a little bit mouldy round the eyes.
As if things weren't already creepy enough, Connelly's daughter acquires an imaginary friend (never a happy development in ghost stories).
Is this creature anything to do with the child who used to live upstairs? Are little bits of Connelly's own unhappy adolescence seeping through the crumbling architecture? Some mysteries were never meant to be solved.
There is certainly something frustrating about the film's obtuseness, and one does occasionally long for it to move above the pace of drizzle down a greasy window pane. But Salles, following up The Motorcycle Diaries with his first English language picture, wrings unease from virtually every frame. Bring galoshes.
