Dark Water Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

not the best of asian horror

I am a big fan of asian horror, that being said this is just and average scare or two after watching and hour or ten minutes of build up. Nice ending to the film though. If you want asain horror choose the eye, the ring or the grudge.

Shallow and overcast.

How disappointing that such a fine cast and crew should make such a pigs ear of this remake of Hideo Nakata’s excellent 2002 thriller. Clearly attempting to capture the mood of the likes of Rosemary’s Baby and Don’t Look Now, Walter Salles’ handsomely shot film trudges along aimlessly and then just stops. Where Nakata’s film ends with a genuinely shattering climax (which was both chilling and heartbreaking), this new version just falls flat – finally acknowledging head-on the supernatural aspect which it had been avoiding since the start, but not quite knowing what to do with it.

Everything else is spelled out with thumping obviousness: the characters of the husband, the real estate agent and the building supervisor are turned into cartoon villains which make the heroine’s predicament almost completely unambiguous. Whereas the original film transpired to be – essentially – a story about a woman coming to terms with the fact that she might not be the best person to raise her daughter, this version hammers home instead the point that the heroine’s childhood paralleled that of the ghostly kid. It doesn’t add any further depth to the proceedings, but – if you’ll forgive the pun – just muddies the water further.

On the plus side, the cast are as fine as you would expect, and the film-makers deserve kudos for not resorting to the usual current Hollywood techniques for portraying ghosts (grey/green make-up, flickery stop-motion style effects) and instead just using a young girl who is creepy because she simply shouldn’t be there.

Well made then, but the original film is more subtle and scarier.