Gore Verbinski, the director of Dreamworks’ The Ring, suggests this trend signals how “Hollywood is just starved for any original ideas, we’ve kind of remade all of our own movies and we’re looking somewhere else, it’s like foreign oil.” But the irony is that many of these Japanese horror films are borrowing elements from the American genre, so Hollywood is essentially re-importing its own material. However, it took Asian directors such as Hideo Nakata (The Ring, Dark Water) to give a twist to American conventions so Hollywood could see familiar material with fresh eyes. What Nakata did with his films was to slow down the pace, downplay the gore, play up the mood and then deliver a kicker ending. In part he and his fellow Japanese directors had to play up mood over gore because of low budgets. But the low budgets also inspired creativity and prompted directors such as Nakata to come up with clever ways to tell their stories.
In adapting these Japanese or J-horror films and adopting their approach to horror, Hollywood has discovered a whole new audience for horror—young girls. Horror had always been geared to boys and young men—hence the gore, sex and big breasted women. But by downplaying gore and having resourceful female protagonists, films such as The Ring and The Grudge have tapped into female audiences. Dark Water hopes to follow in those footsteps.
Jennifer Connelly in Dark Water (Buena Vista)
Dark Water’s protagonist is Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly), a young woman recently separated. She’s also trying to negotiate with her hostile estranged spouse (Dougray Scott) over custody of their little girl Ceci (Ariel Gade). Because of limited funds, Dahlia and Ceci move into rundown apartment on Roosevelt Island on the edges of New York City. In addition to an elevator with a mind of its own, a creepy water tower on the roof, and some weird residents, Dahlia also has to cope with a sinister and ever expanding black water stain on her ceiling. Then strange things start to happen. Dark water drips from the ceiling, hair comes out of the bathroom faucet and Ceci gets a friend named Natasha that only she can see. Dahlia starts having nightmares and thinks that she sees a little girl that may be the missing child from the apartment above. But since Dahlia is under a lot of stress and suffers, according to her husband, from mental instability, she wonders if she’s just imagining all this. When Ceci passes out at school after a bizarre incident, Dahlia becomes determined to solve the mystery of the dark water and the little girl from upstairs.
The ability of Dark Water to connect with audiences will all depend on expectations. If people come in expecting American horror, they will be disappointed. There’s no gore, no driving pace, no smart-alecky one liners. Instead, there’s a story of a woman coping with her childhood fears of abandonment and trying to be a good mother to her young child. And although a ghost figures into the equation, the real horror has nothing to do with the supernatural but rather with the terror children feel when a parent forgets to pick them up.
The Hollywood incarnation of Dark Water follows the Japanese original in outline and general atmosphere. It also aims for the same emotional resolution to its story as the Japanese original but it does so in a far less elegant and clever manner. Both films end with a mother making a sacrifice for her daughter. But the original worked out its ending in quieter, less melodramatic terms, and with the sacrifice being less obvious to the daughter and others. Director Hideo Nakata also invested the original with a simpler, more streamlined narrative and a subtler creepiness.
As directed by Walter Salles and adapted by Rafael Yglesias, the American Dark Water spends too much time trying to suggest that Dahlia is mentally unbalanced and therefore imagining everything. Although the filmmakers are Latin and come from indie filmmaking, they reveal a very Hollywood need to provide a logical foundation to explain away the supernatural. Grounding this ghost story in the real world is good but making the heroine seem loony and question her own sanity from the get go feels too gimmicky and contrived. What is often refreshing in Asian ghost stories is a kind of casualness about the possibility of the supernatural being a part of everyday life.
The Brazilian Salles (who scored a hit with his bio of Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries) may not initially seem an appropriate choice for this project. But he cites a five-hour documentary series on the conflict between modernity and tradition in Japan as providing insight into how Japanese culture perceives ghosts and the afterlife. He also claims a love for genre films and ghosts. He displays compassion for his characters and gets their emotions right but he is less skilled at building tension and creepiness, and finding an innovative way to tell this particular ghost story.
Dark Water has attractive, skilled performers. In addition to Connelly’s stressed mother, Tim Roth appears briefly as a nice but quirky lawyer, Pete Postelwaite as the building super who may be hiding some secrets, and Camryn Manheim as a concerned teacher.
Dark Water (rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, disturbing images and brief language) is a tepid entry in the current Asian remake cycle. Salles does try to take the horror genre in a refreshing direction by rooting it more in the real world and by trying to emphasize the emotional drama over the scares. But Salles doesn’t fully succeed in his attempts so Dark Water ends up straddling the genres of horror and chick flick, and failing to do justice to either.
