Connelly Floats Above Dark Water

Single mother Dahlia Williams (Jennifer Connelly) is trying to make a brand-new start in life with her cherished five-year-old daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade). Moving into a dilapidated apartment complex in New York’s sprawling Roosevelt Island neighborhood, she’s locked in a bitter custody battle with her ex Kyle (Dougray Scott). With his venomous accusations hitting too close to home, many of them teetering on the brink of driving her mad, she’s chosen Roosevelt Island not just for the excellent elementary school near by but also because it’s about as far away from him as she can hope to get.

Better his stinging accusations, however, than the strange occurrences going inside her new apartment 9F. Not only is little Ceci acting rather oddly, especially when asked about her new imaginary friend Natalie, someone else keeps going into the vacant apartment upstairs to flood the place with gallons of disgustingly dark water. This causes ugly and grotesque black seepage to fall from their bedroom ceiling, and no matter how hard Dahlia complains to the management or how many times it appears to get fixed the problem just keeps getting progressively worse.

Soon the distraught mother finds she’s having unsettling nightmares of an abandoned little girl with striking similarities to herself. With the line between fantasy and reality cracking, Dahlia knows she has to pull things together or risk losing custody of Ceci to Kyle. But when she suspects the quiet and abrasive building maintenance man Veeek (Pete Postlethwaite) is hiding secrets about what really happened in apartment 10F, the truth maybe too much for even the determined Dahlia to handle especially in her increasingly fidgety and fragile mental state.

Based on the novel by Koji Suzuki and the film by “Ringu” auteur Hideo Nakata, “The Motorcycle Diaries” director Walter Salles breaks into Hollywood with the deft and assuredly solemn ghost story “Dark Water.” Working from and intensely emotional screenplay by “Fearless” scribe Rafael Yglesias, this is a superbly internalized drama intent on dealing with the harshest of human sensations. It is a brooding, visually foreboding thriller, made with the grit and grace of a filmmaker near the top of his game.

One problem: it’s not very scary. For a movie blatantly billed as being so this is definitely not a good trait to possess. I cannot help but think audiences are going to come away from this deeply disappointed, upset that they were sold a bill of goods utterly different than what was promised. Sent into the summer box office battlefields in the middle of a prolonged slump I’ll take bets now this is going to quickly disappear no matter what I or anyone else has to say in its defense.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try anyhow. “Dark Water” is a fine melodrama, perfectly layered and acted with sublime pinpoint precision. Once I accepted the fact Salles wasn’t going for the intense scares of the Japanese original but instead trying to dig far deeper than that I had no problem enjoying the picture. In fact, its intense and moving final moments left me so wrung out I suddenly found I needed to scour through my purse looking for nonexistent Kleenex.

Connelly is simply magnificent, every bit as good here as she was in her Oscar-winning role in “A Beautiful Mind” and plumbing psychological depths she hasn’t had to encounter since her tour-de-force in Darren Aronofsky’s shattering “Requiem for a Dream.” It’s an astonishingly detailed portrayal, Connelly drawing the audience in so completely it is nearly impossible to not be moved by her forcefully final fateful decisions. She’s nearly matched by the trio of Oscar-nominated actors; Tim Roth (“Rob Roy”), John C. Reilly (“Chicago”) and Postlethwaite (“In the Name of the Father”); backing her up, each playing decidedly different sorts of characters than we’ve seem from them in quite some time. Roth, in particular, follows up his stand-out bit in “The Beautiful Country” with his second sterling portrait in a row. Like in that film, I wanted to see more of him and I can’t help but wish Yglesias and Salles couldn’t have made room for Roth’s eccentric lawyer in just a couple more scenes.

The other actors do just fine. Camryn Manheim is solid as a caring, quizzical preschool teacher while Scott makes the most of the not-as-bad-as-he-looks Kyle even if much of the character’s dimensions are surprisingly absent from the screenplay. As for the children, both Gade and Perla Haney-Jardine are perfectly okay, but I’d be lying if I said wasn’t getting more than a little tired of spooky little kids with coal-black hair who are mysteriously wise beyond their years. For that matter, after “Hide and Seek” I’m done with imaginary friends, and even though this twist is far more believable here that it was in that mess of frightmare I still can’t say it was a twist I found all that palatable.

No matter, Salles directs so assuredly and Yglesias’ script is so solid I’m willing to forgive a few of those missteps. A visually poetic director to begin with, Salles commandeers the camera movements of both Polanski and Kubrick, gliding through the intensely emotional proceedings with unwavering patience and unforgiving temerity. This very well could be cinematographer Affonso Beato’s (“Ghost World”) finest hour, while production designer Thérèse DePrez (“The Door in the Floor”) and Oscar-nominated editor Daniel Rezende (“City of God”) outdo themselves with their stellar work. Best of all is David Lynch stalwart Angelo Badalamenti’s (“Mulholland Dr.”) ethereal score gifting things with a ghostly menace and a feeling of forbidding dread the literal spirits haunting the picture can’t begin to manage on their own.

Still, as good as it all is it is still hard not to be at least a wee bit disappointed. Nakata’s original was a masterpiece of purely visceral terror while this one only hints at the extreme horror slowly washing over the characters. But Salles isn’t interested in normal everyday scares, what frightens him is far more visceral. Loss. Regret. Mourning. Abandonment. These are the things that affect him, and as such it’s this mood of distinct melancholy, of almost unbreakable sadness, that permeates everyone residing within the director’s cinematic world. The result is that this makes “Dark Water” an adult horror tale more akin to the human terrors of “Ordinary People” than the more gruesome ones depicted in say “The Sixth Sense” or “The Others,” which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I think it’s almost perfect. I’m just not too sure audiences are going to agree.

Film Rating: êêê  (out of 4)