Surface Tension

Water, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously told us, is everywhere. No film proves this to us more than “Dark Water”, a film from Hideo Nakata of “Ringu” fame. Having shown his audience the darker side of video technology, Nakata now sets out to do the near impossible: make water frightening. Because, let’s face it, water isn’t frightening. Or is it? The fact that water is everywhere means that if water does have a dark side, you’d best be afraid. Water is elemental, and difficult to control. Water’s combination of familiarity and mystery makes for an effective chiller.

“Dark Water” takes us clearly into the same territory as such seminal works as “The Shining” and “Don’t Look Now”. It therefore presents a particular challenge to the reviewer: how to discuss the film while not giving away so much that seeing the film itself becomes pointless. For this reason, there won’t be much discussion of plot or events here, more an attempt to convey how effective a film it is.

What plot I’m willing to discuss is this: Yoshimi Matsubara (Hitomi Kuroki) is in the process of divorcing her husband, and moves into a new apartment building with her five-year-old daughter Ikuko (Rio Kanno). It isn’t long before strange things begin to plague their lives in the building, the culmination of which is both surprising and depressing.

Nakata effectively shows how horror works in the modern world. It no longer exists in the gothic mansion or the stormy night. Now it survives in the building where only you seem to live, where all the floors look the same, and where video surveillance can show you exactly what’s wrong, but can’t do anything to stop it. The washed-out city of “Dark Water” creates an atmosphere of looming dread as a perfect backdrop to a slow-burning horror which leaves shadows in the mind.

For a long time while watching “Dark Water”, I though that this review was going to be a negative one. The shocks are limited in scope for much of the running time, and certain plot points seem obviously telegraphed in advance. This is the skill of the director, using the fact that I have seen horror films before, and my resultant preconceptions, to deceive me with sleight of hand. The real shocks and twists are thus all the more forceful when they arrive.

A few years ago I believed that a new era of horror film-making had dawned, with the “Scream” trilogy finishing off the slasher genre forever, and the likes of “The Blair Witch Project” ushering in a new age of psychological horror. The fact that Hollywood continues to produce slasher films has shown me to be wrong, but films like “Dark Water” give me continued hope. This is a horror film that lacks both monsters and evil, and is all the more horrifying for it.