Dark Water (2005)

Dark Water (2005)

Dir. Walter Salles

Struggling mother Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly) moves into a dingy apartment in Roosevelt Island with her young daughter Cecilia (Ariel Gade). The building has seen better days, but the recurring dark splodge in one corner of the child's bedroom ceiling may point to something more malevolent than leaky pipes.

Dir. Walter Salles didn't make a lazy US by-the-numbers horror film, which was a pleasant surprise, and nor did he simply replicate Hideo Nakata's superior 2002 film version wholesale, but there's no passion in any of it, perhaps least of all in Connolly.

The Manhattan setting is a clever nod to the 'island' backdrop that's relevant to many Japanese works, and attempting to tether a meaningfully sombre tone to the original story's psychological one was interesting, but ultimately it's just boring. It's also devoid of scares, which I don't think was intentional.