Dark Water (2002)
Once again working from a book by Kôji Suzuki, Hideo Nakata re-established his position as Japan’s finest horror director after shooting to prominence with Ringu (and its first sequel). Staying with supernatural horror and, like Ringu, featuring a single woman with a young child at the centre of the film, Dark Water (Honogurai Mizu no soko kara lit) begins with Yoshimi Matsubara battling for, and winning, custody of her six-year-old daughter, Ikuko. Without a job, Yoshimi must settle for meagre accommodation in a run-down apartment block, with a strange water stain on the ceiling that won’t go away.
The caretaker isn’t much help and refuses to investigate the source of the stain that begins to spread and leak into the main bedroom. Yoshimi is further troubled by the appearance of a child’s bag that Ikuko finds on the roof by a huge water tower. After a short stay in the lost and found, Yoshimi discovers that the caretaker has thrown the bag away despite Ikuko’s attachment and desire to have it and the toys inside.
The young girl is having a hard time in kindergarten, not fitting in very well and seeing things that aren’t there. Meanwhile the water in the apartment has a strange taste and some hair even comes out of the tap whilst the stain just continues to grow.
Unsurprisingly, Dark Water is thematically similar to Ringu, focusing on what a mother will do for her child and incorporating supernatural elements to tell a story with a simple explanation and moving ending. There are also several well-orchestrated jumps which are helped by the pervasive sense of unease throughout the film. Yoshimi is an extremely likable character with whom you empathise and her relationship with her daughter, strained through juggling work and childcare commitments, will be familiar to many single parents.
As the follow up to Ringu, this sees a reunion of its director, producer (Japanese horror guru Takashige Ichise) and writer and is of the same quality as that landmark film. Dark Water hinges on the performances of the mother and daughter, as a relationship that didn’t ring true would ruin the film, but Hitomi Kuroki and Rio Kanno are perfect, with the latter putting in a performance beyond her years.
As a big fan of Ringu, I approached Dark Water with extremely high expectations, hoping that Hideo Nakata would have made a suitably powerful and unnerving film which had Kôji Suzuki's all over it. I found this film to be better than Ringu with a much more involving central relationship and the ending was far more involving than that in Nakata's breakthrough picture. I suppose it helps that this doesn't rely on technology and isn't part of that trend in Asian horror films to take a piece of technology, whether it's a phone, camera or the Internet and turn it into something malevolent and dangerous. This is a much more grounded horror film that would quite easily have worked as a drama but that would have lacked the intensity and shocks that make Dark Water the great film that it is and why I consider it a masterpiece of modern horror.
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