One thing I’ve come to expect from horror movies is either bad acting, or a plot that doesn’t make a lot of sense.  But, good acting is especially rare, and when it exists, as in movies like Darkness, the plot is so screwy it doesn’t even matter.  Dark Water has abruptly changed this theory for me.

            Dark Water opens with Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly) as a child, waiting in the rain for her mother to pick her up from school.  When she finally arrives, she glares at the child and roughly drags her into the car.  Flash to the present, and while torrential rain again pours outside, Dahlia is shown sitting sadly in a dim office waiting for the clock to hit 11:00am, so she can go into her child custody appointment.  As an adult, she is now always early to wherever goes.

            Dahlia and her husband are in the process of a bitter divorce, and because the price is right, she moves into a dilapidated, crumbling apartment building with their young daughter, Ceci.  Soon, Ceci has an imaginary friend who happens to go by the name of the girl who used to live in the apartment above them.  To make things worse, a water leak in their ceiling keeps getting worse, and Dahlia begins to witness things that make her question her sanity.

            The atmosphere is gloomy and overcast, which only added to the anxiety I already felt watching the film.  From the beginning, I felt Connelly’s sadness and confusion as vividly as I felt James C. Reilly’s insincerity.  Pete Postlethwaite gives a terrific, unexpected turn as the selfish, crotchety caretaker of the apartment building they end up living in; Tim Roth adds to the comic relief as Dahlia’s lawyer:  a man who claims to be spending time with his family and instead is sitting in a dark, nearly-empty theater.  Reilly is perfect as the landlord who pretends to care, even going as far as to appeal to the daughter, in order to sell the apartment. 

            Dark Water is written by the same author of the Ring series, Kôji Suzuki.  It’s deliciously creepy, a movie that plays with your mind while inspiring goose bumps to run up and down your spine.  Besides being scary, it also has a plot that drives the film, letting the audience know what drives and motivates the characters, why they feel the way they do:  the decisions the characters make are foreshadowed at the beginning of the movie, like Dahlia’s abandonment by her mother.

            The movie plays out very slowly, pulling out every scene in agonizing detail.  Given this, the one thing that left me disappointed was the hasty ending.  Within minutes of its climax, the film ended.  Instead of keeping it under two hours, I would’ve preferred to have gotten a little more information to round out the story; A small complaint, though, for a truly creepy and frightening movie.