Common Sense Note
Parents should know that the film features frightening scenes in which a young mother and her six-year-old daughter are haunted by a seeming ghost. The mother is also disturbed by flashbacks to a troubled past (her alcoholic mother tells her she "hates" her) and a custody battle with her estranged husband. The movie includes some language, tense family scenes, and jump scenes.
Families might talk about the tensions between mother and daughter, in part caused by the mother's past (indicated by nightmares and flashbacks). How does the daughter's "imaginary friend" worry her mother? How does the antagonism between mother and father exacerbate their daughter's fears of abandonment, loss, and retribution? How does the external world (specifically, the apartment) serve as metaphor for mother and daughter's internal states?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
Pushing the edge of PG-13 with regard to scary scenes and family tensions, DARK WATER's greatest strength is Jennifer Connelly. As Dahlia, a young mother in the midst of divorce, Connelly delivers a delicate, moving, and utterly convincing performance. A remake of director Hideo Nakata and writer Kôji Suzuki's 2002 film (they also made Ringu, source for The Ring), Walter Salles' movie creates a world that is rainy, spooky, and grim.
Dahlia first appears as a child in "Seattle 1974," waiting for her alcoholic mother to pick her up from school. She stands on the sidewalk, her knee socks pushed down around her slender ankles, her hip cocked in weary expectation, her umbrella looking more ominous than protective. Cut forward to "New York City 2005," as a grown-up Dahlia (Connelly) gazes out a window on still more rain. Again, she's waiting, this time for an appointment with divorce mediators. When her wayward, about-to-be-ex husband Kyle (Dougray Scott) arrives, he argues with her, resenting her passivity, emotional instability, and illness (she suffers from nightmares and migraines, apparently effects of her difficult childhood.
Trying to move on, Dahlia and her precocious daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade) take an apartment on Roosevelt Island, NY, some distance from Jersey City, where Kyle lives near his girlfriend. Both the building manager Mr. Murray (John C. Reilly) and the super Veeck (Pete Postlethwaite) appear distracted and unwilling to fix the leak in Ceci's bedroom.
As the apartment becomes increasingly dark and wet -- reflecting Dahlia's state of mind -- Ceci starts talking to an "imaginary friend" who has a particular affection for a pink Hello Kitty backpack. This little girl might be Natasha (Perla Haney-Jardine), who used to live upstairs and whose sad family photo has been left behind. As Natasha seems a child abandoned by her parents, her story haunts Dahlia as well.
Dahlia's fear of being a bad mother like her own (or like Natasha's) drives her to take repeated horror-movie style risks (walking into empty rooms, exploring the building's roof at night). Dahlia's experiences -- past and present, inside and outside, night and day -- begin to blur, as she's either believing or fulfilling Kyle's judgment that she's "wacko." She turns to a lawyer, Platzer (Tim Roth), who appears alternately quirky and reassuring. On one level, this seems funny (or ironic), that he lawyer is so unable to bring order to her nightmare; on the other hand, his inability to help suggests that Dahlia is abandoned, much as she has feared since she was a child.
Horror movies frequently use the figure of the ineffective or bad mom (not to mention the murderous father; see the recent Hide and Seek), and so Dahlia's selfless resolve seems almost bracing. But Dark Water never develops either her particular dilemmas or responses beyond generic conventions. By film's end, it seems, she's still waiting.
Families who like this movie might also want to see the Japanese movie on which it's based, Honogurai mizu no soko kara (2002), The Others, The Ring, The Haunting (1963), or Panic Room (rated R, and also focused on a mother protecting her daughter).
Rate It!
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ViolenceImplied violence (including drowning), and some scary, tense scenes. |
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LanguageSome strong language. |
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Social BehaviorParents argue, mother leaves her child at school. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoAn alcoholic mother appears in unnerving flashbacks; a character takes pills for migraine headaches. |
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