Dark Water
Three Stars
by Norman Wilner, Zap2it.com
"Dark Water" is a laudable attempt to revive the classical psychological thriller, as perfected by Roman Polanski in "Repulsion," "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Tenant:" It's all atmosphere and suffocating dread, with the audience invited to question whether single mother Jennifer Connelly really is enduring an uninvited haunting, or if she's just cracking under the strain of a bad divorce and an even worse apartment.
But while it's possible to admire the filmmakers' intentions - and even to acknowledge that "Dark Water" is an expertly made movie built around an excellent central performance -- one still winds up admitting it doesn't quite result in a satisfying experience.
Walter Salles, the acclaimed director of last year's "The Motorcycle Diaries," has surrounded Connelly with a great supporting cast -- Dougray Scott as her sniping ex, John C. Reilly as a cheerfully negligent property manager, Tim Roth as a well-meaning attorney, Pete Postlethwaite as a curiously foreign superintendent -- but then spends so much time fixing every element of the story carefully into place that there's no room to appreciate the effort.
When the action does creep outside Connelly's decrepit apartment - usually to the nearby kindergarten where her daughter (Ariel Gade) spends most of her time arguing with an angry imaginary friend -- it feels repetitive and confused, as though the film doesn't know what to do with fresh air.
It also doesn't help that "Dark Water" is the latest in a long line of Japanese horror adaptations which all seem to revolve around scary ghosts and creepy buildings, or that Hideo Nakata, who directed the original, borrowed its climax for last spring's "The Ring 2," forcing rewriter Rafael Yglesias to improvise a sudden detour in the final reel that bursts the story's claustrophobic spell.
Touchstone is releasing two different versions of "Dark Water" to DVD -- a full-frame disc of the PG-13 theatrical cut, and an enhanced-widescreen edition of the unrated director's cut. The director's cut contains nothing that would have risked a harsher rating, by the way -- it's actually two minutes shorter.
Whichever version of the film you watch, you'll get the same supplements: A half-hour documentary (also viewable as five separate featurettes); another half-hour of interviews with the cast and crew; a short look at the sound design, two very short deleted scenes and brief breakdowns of three crucial scenes, one of which features a multi-audio dissection of that slithery soundtrack.
