Dark Water
(Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara)

Programme Notes

DIRECTED BY: Hideo Nakata

STARRING: Hitomi Kuroki,
Rio Kanno,
Mirei Oguchi,
Asami Mizukawa

RUNNING TIME: 1 HOUR 41 MINUTES

LANGAUGE: Japanese
Subtitled in English

Japanese horror guru Hideo Nakata combines Roeg and Polanski in a masterpiece of foreboding

Mark Kermode Sunday June 8, 2003 The Observer

[Read The Review Here]

Not so long ago, mainstream horror movies were dominated by infantile US schlock in which dumb American teenagers were chased around by guys in hockey masks while anyone in the audience over the age of 15 wondered why rubbish Seventies-style slasher movies were suddenly back in vogue. Then, just when you thought you couldn't watch another

Hollywood brat get sliced-and-diced, along came a slew of Eastern frighteners to re-animate the putrefying genre. In the same way that the Italian giallo maestros like Mario Bava and Dario Argento had inspired John Carpenter and Brian De Palma in the Sixties and Seventies, now Japanese film-makers such as Hideo Nakata and Takashi Miike emerged to lead international horror cinema out of the wilderness. Their respective calling cards were Ring, which offered skin-crawling scares from a cursed video-tape of the lank-haired child-monster Sadako; and Audition, which left audiences cowering as a blind-date turned nasty courtesy of needles and piano wire ('And now for the other foot...'). Although stylistically dissimilar, these films had two things in common: they were both Japanese, and they both reminded us what it was like to feel genuinely alarmed by a horror movie.

Now Nakata returns with Dark Water, another compulsively creepy chiller from the pen of Koji Suzuki, upon whose popular novels the Ring movies were based. While the Americans have been desperately trying to catch up with their pointless English language remake of Ring (which botched all the original's set pieces), Nakata has moved on, creating a ghost story superior in ambition, intellect and maturity. Set in a run-down apartment block drenched in creeping, mouldering leakage, the slim but satisfying narrative centres on an emotionally fragile single mother and her troubled five-year-old daughter, who may or may not be haunted by the apparition of a missing schoolgirl. Fearing for her sanity, and terrified of losing custody of her child, Yoshimi (a wide-eyed Hitomi Kuroki) struggles to hold things together while beset by ghostly footsteps and monstrous damp patches that grow ever more engulfing.

If one word sums up the power of Dark Water, it is dread. Framed in chilly blue and green hues, with flashbacks drenched in melancholic ochre, everything in it seems portentous, from the angular shape of a kindergarten building to the garish colour of a child's abandoned bag. Offering us only glimpses of the uncanny (a shadow on a video-screen here, a movement in a half-opened doorway there), Nakata creates a world that drips with the kind of impending doom so often lacking in contemporary frighteners. Nor is this merely the horror of anticipated shocks, although this moody ghost story does deliver at least two moments of stark revelation worthy of the sturdiest bogeyman romps.
But it is the threat of genuine emotional pain that in the end causes us to watch Dark Water from behind protective fingers. For while so many sub-standard thrillers use children in peril as a short cut to audience involvement, Nakata's artistry earns an emotional investment in his characters which gives us (like them) something to lose. While we may want the faceless victims of most horror movies to get skewered, here we are left desperately hoping that Yoshimi and young Ikuko will emerge unscathed - and from such heartfelt anxiety springs genuine terror.

Although fans of Nakata's earlier work will recognise many leitmotifs, Dark Water is a far more 'grown up' film than Ring. Comparisons with Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now are inevitable, although Nakata's reference points are harder to pin down, seemingly ranging from Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba to Roman Polanski's The Tenant. Ultimately, this is a tragic love story, littered with fragments of surreal phantasmagoria, but bound together by a recognisable domestic situation. Like all great horror films, Dark Water can scare you when it wants to, but it's the undercurrent of sadness and longing which continues to haunt after it is finished. How long it will take the rest of the world to catch up is anyone's guess (I await with dread the inevitable Hollywood remake). For now, those searching for the future of horror should look to the East.

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