[yasr_overall_rating]
A mother and her 6 year old daughter move into a creepy apartment whose every surface is permeated by water.
Elisa Lam was a Canadian student who was recovered from a water tank atop the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles in 2013. Lamb had been reported missing a month earlier. Maintenance workers at the hotel discovered the body when guests began complaining of dark colored water. The last footage of Lam shows the woman behaving in a peculiar manner in an elevator. 2002’s “Dark Water” (there’s also a lousier American version from 2005), tells the story of a divorced mother, Yoshimi Matsubara (Hitomi Kuroki), who moves into a rundown apartment with her daughter, Ikuko Matsubara (Rio Kanno), and begins to experience strange water leaks from the floor above as well as dark material emerging from the water. Towards the end of “Dark Water,” the woman rushes into the elevator as she is pursued by an apparition. This is a very weird case of life imitating art. With just a weekend’s worth of rewriting, a screenwriter could easily turn “Dark Water” into the Elisa Lam story.
I’d really like to give away the plot of “Dark Water” because to do so would be to reveal the very reason to watch the film but its phantom is Mitsuko Kawai (Mirei Oguchi), a young girl who fell into a water tank while trying to retrieve her school bag and drowned.
“Dark Water” is a throwback to Victorian style ghost stories with a crumbling, forlorn apartment filled with unusual occurrences. The soundtrack also paralyzes with ominous and foreboding music. If ghost stories frightening you, this one will do the trick.
The film was directed by Hideo Nakata, who is much more famous for directing the slightly better “Ringu” (“The Ring” in America). I’ve not heard much of Nakata in recent years with his films “Words with Gods” and “Ghost Theater” receiving mixed to negative reactions. “Dark Water” however, portrays Nakata at the top of his game even though the film might have had more effect if the story had attempted to take less twists and turns like tacking on an entirely unnecessary epilogue. The movie nevertheless is effective because Nakata knows that this film is a ghost story, plain and simple. There are some legitimately frightening moments in this film that rival the bathroom scene in “The Shining” with the shriveled old naked lady. As always, some really lovely extra features by Arrow on this one.
Available now on a 2-Disc Special Edition Blu-ray from Arrow Video
