Dark Water

SYNOPSIS

With films like House of Sand and Fog and Requiem for a Dream, it seems that Jennifer Connelly has spent most of her career playing women on the edge. She certainly works up a convincing sweat here, playing a single mother whose daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade) makes friends with the ghostly little girl upstairs, as a sinister damp patch appears on the ceiling of their apartment. Initially filmed in 2002 by Japanese horror maestro Hideo Nakata (Ring), this tale is put through the Hollywood wringer by director Walter Salles and all the really scary stuff is taken out in the process. With murky visuals and claustrophobic camerawork, he builds an atmosphere of supernatural suspense that never fully pays off. What saves the film is the tenderly drawn bond between mother and daughter, clinging to each other in a wash of uncertainty (and possible insanity). In the end, it's the threat of them being torn apart that proves more menacing than the dodgy plumbing.