DVD Reviews

Dark Water

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Jennifer Connelly
• Details: US, 105 mins, 15A.

Haunted houses, imaginary friends, scary little girls... there's nothing cliched in that, surely? This year's other Hollywood horror house was the Amityville Horror; and what a load of twank that was. Thankfully, Dark Water - a remake of Japanese director Hideo Nakata's Honogurai mizu no soko kara - is a more brooding affair than Amityville and foregoes toned torsos for an unusually slow set up and some psychological conditioning. However, something is lost in translation, and director Salles's (Motorcycle Diaries, the in-production On the Road) interpretation suffers the same fate as the adaptations of Nakata's Ring films. This is a bog (excuse the pun) standard movie about a haunted apartment which is almost saved from mediocrity by the performances of the exceptional cast. If Stephen King's It made you freak out about drains and the like, Dark Water will make you think completely differently about leaky ceilings.


Extras: Making of, Deleted Scenes, ensemble, Alternative Sequences.

Review by Elaine Reilly