Alright, we’re headed back to Japan, kids, ‘cause I guess we just can’t get enough J-horror. Behind the scenes, I’ve been running through the Ring and Grudge series, partially because I’ve been meaning to tackle them, partially in preparation for an upcoming Nightmare Fuel entry. (Can’t wait, I hear it’s a doozy.) Now, I’m looking to fill out my ticking list with the remainder of the heavy hitters of Japanese horror, and today it’s come to Dark Water.
Dark Water, sadly missing any pirates voyaging thereupon (that show may not have been the greatest, but it had some imagination for its time), comes to us from Nakata Hideo, who previously brought us Ringu. Like that film, this one is also based on a story by Suzuki Koji, and the overall themes and motifs are fairly similar, much like the tone of the two films.
The film tells us about a mother going through a rough divorce, all the while trying to take care of and maintain custody of her young daughter. She hasn’t got much money, so she’s forced to move into a relatively derelict apartment, which seems to have something of a plumbing problem, manifesting itself in a water stain on the ceiling. Our mother is out finding work and wrestling with her soon-to-be-ex-husband and his lawyers, her daughter just trying to keep on keeping on while she suffers through her mother’s somewhat understandable tardiness and stress. As time goes on, the stain on the ceiling worsens, as does the leak causing it, and the mother experience some strange sights and sounds. Her building’s super (or the equivalent thereof, anyway) seems reticent to do anything about the water damage. The mother slowly feels the tension of a potentially supernatural occurrence messing with her and threatening both her daughter’s safety and her own sanity.
Much like other Japanese horror films of the time, particularly Ju-on: The Grudge and Pulse, the overall atmosphere of Dark Water is one of isolation, desolation, and almost austere emotional pregnancy. The cinematography from Hayashi Junichiro is rather cold, static, emphasizing the relentless blandness of the décor and the overbearingness of the matter-of-fact nature of the mother’s unenviable situation. The film looks almost documentary-like in its presentation, eschewing stylism in favor of stark realism, letting the spectres do their thing without aid or hindrance from the filmmakers. It all lets the performance of Kuroki Hitomi organically shine through the watery din, really drawing us into her plight and deteriorating mental space.
In all honesty, the film doesn’t seem to be about scares so much as slow-burn unease and disturbance. Jump-scares are few, far-between, and hardly recognizable as such (they’re there, though, trust me). In their stead stands a bevy of long-lasting scenes of mounting dread; even the ostensibly placid ending leaves you feeling just a bit off about things. It’s a rare feat for a film to effectively pull such a thing off, but Dark Water mostly succeeds. Mostly, I say, because there are times I feel I was meant to be creeped-out, but I just wasn’t feeling much of anything. The drawback to the heavily realistic style is that what misses does so with just as much gusto as what hits. Here, it’s mostly hits, thanks in large part to Kuroki’s strong performance, but there are enough misses to make themselves felt in the overall.
Probably unsurprisingly the same can’t fully be said of the American remake that graced our shores three years after the Japanese original.
The plot is pretty much just an Americanization of Nakata’s original: Our soon-to-be-fully-single mother is forced into a less-than-ideal part of town (I can’t speak from personal knowledge or experience, but the script seems to think rather lowly of Roosevelt Island) with her young daughter, and her apartment increasingly shows signs of water damage from above. Again, reticence from building management to fix the problem. Again, tussling with her former man for custody while finding work. Again, strange occurrences lead to potentiality of haunting. We’ve seen this before.
This time around, though, things aren’t dealt with in that cold, matter-of-fact manner that Nagata employed; rather, director Walter Salles underlines everything – the relentless drabness of the surroundings, the shadiness of the building’s management, the creepiness of the super/handyman (I never know how to refer to these guys), the apparently foreboding nature of just about everyone and everything our mother here lays eyes on – fairly dramatically and overly clearly. I mean, I guess there isn’t as much room for “misinterpretation” anywhere, but it gets to be a bit much in the first few scenes, where people and objects are marked for our interest like a cheap mystery novel or a late-90s-style, uber-meta horror flick looking to subvert our expectations. Thanks, Salles, needed that, I guess. Plus, all of the characteristics that were pointed out in the original, like the super’s shiftiness, the ex-husband’s underhandedness, and the daughter’s, shall we say, precociousness, are all blown up to more extreme proportions here, making the characters really shifty, really determined to undermine his ex in the divorce proceedings, really, really obnoxious. Subtlety isn’t the featured item on the menu tonight, kids.
The other primary difference between this remake and the original is in the mother’s character, rather her backstory. We don’t know much about the Japanese version beyond what we see in the narrative. It’s almost as though the character hardly existed before we first see her, save what we can extrapolate: she was married, had a daughter, grew unhappy in the union, sought a divorce, moved out. Oh, and she used to work in publishing as a proofreader. Anything else is up for grabs, really, and our focus is on how she’s handling the situation at hand. The American version, on the other hand, well, she’s got quite the backstory to her, one centering on issues of abandonment from childhood. We see several vignettes from her past, all of it building to a sort of symbolic coming-full-circle when her own daughter might be taken away. I will grant that this addition is at least partially welcome, in that it provides some additional weight to things, but it also muddies the already dark waters (ha, I made a funny) when it comes to her mental state and whether or not there is actually a haunting going on. Usually I prefer when stories allow for layers to evolve, but here, given the example of the original, it just seems a bit much, as though they were trying to be different and involved but couldn’t quite cross the finish line with the proper oomph. Basically, the addition didn’t land for me, so I think it’s unnecessary; had it landed, I’d likely feel differently. Alas.
What partially saves the remake is the ensemble acting. Jennifer Connelly matches Kuroki’s performance in depth and intensity, while Pete Postlethwaite gives the super more roundedness than before. John C. Reilly adds much more slipperiness and underhandedness to the building’s manager, while Ariel Gade ups the daughter’s obnoxiousness factor by nearly an order of magnitude, making the character difficult to sit with for much of her screen time.
When all is said and done, I prefer the original Japanese Dark Water over the American remake, but it’s not as much of a landslide victory as one would expect from such a situation. The remakes of Pulse and Shutter and even bits of The Ring and The Grudge show how much an original story can be watered-down in the process of being remade. Here, there isn’t much damage done to the story, just a different perspective for the protagonist. It’s almost pick-your-poison, but the Japanese version just feels spookier, more creepily atmospheric to me, so it gets my vote. Both are worthy of views, but I would temper my expectations if they’re looking forward to another Ringu or Ju-on.
Allusions of Grandeur 