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| DARK WATER. 2001. Starring - Hitomi Kuroki - Rio Kanno - Mirei Oguchi - Shigemitsu Ogi. Director - Hideo Nakata. After a fairly amicable divorce, things start to go awry for Yoshimi Matsubara after her ex-husband begins proceedings to gain custody of their 5-year-old daughter Ikuko. Mr. Matsubara is not going to play nicely either, bringing out all the skeletons from Yoshimi’s closet especially the questionable fragility of Yoshimi’s mind. The rather eerie new apartment she finds herself sharing with her daughter doesn’t help the stability of Yoshimi’s mind. A dark water stain has appeared above Yoshimi’s bed and appears to be spreading across the room. After several calls to the apartment manager to resolve this problem go unheeded she decides to investigate for herself. She soon discovers that the apartment above her belonged to the Kawai family who moved out shortly after their daughter Mitsuko disappeared 2 years earlier. Her body was never found and no one was charged over her disappearance. During her investigations Yoshimi begins to see strange apparitions of a yellow cloaked schoolgirl. Could this be Mitsuko? As Yoshimi’s mind unwinds Ikuko becomes more and more neglected, and she too starts to act in a bizarre manner. Mr. Matsubara revels in these revelations as he takes full advantage in trying to gain full custody of Ikuko. Because of the success of The Ring and Ring 2 you kind of expect Hideo Nakata’s next movie to be something special. Especially when he teams up again with the author of The Ring, Koji Suzuki. This time they tell the tale of Yoshimi, recently divorced and struggling to cope with a new life and an ongoing custody battle. Sounds simple enough but in true Nakata fashion things are complicated further by the ghostly goings on upstairs. The long haired girl with slightly obscured features theme is getting a bit stale with me. It seems that too many movies hailing from Japan are relying on this scare tactic in a way that the masked slasher has terrorised Hollywood for years. Anyway after reading many reviews for this movie I know a lot of people really liked it, and I am sure some of you will also. Unfortunately I didn’t, I found it basically to be too slow and boring. There is nothing wrong with the film technically, the camerawork is of a high standard and the scoring is subtle and moody. Kiroki Hitomi as Yoshimi is a competent enough character but she doesn’t exude any kind of charisma thus leaving me uncaring as to her uncomfortable plight. Primarily I wanted to be scared shitless by this film but apart from one occasion I wasn’t, and for a horror movie this simply isn’t good enough. The tension building just goes on and on until whoo, a red bag is there again. How scary is that? Special mention must be made of the finale to Dark Water; it is strangely unfathomable and quite literally stupid. It is one of those ‘ now what was the point in that’ moments. Just like this film really, a let down of massive proportions. I expect and deserve better than this and so do you. 4****stars. |
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