Wading Game

water, water everywhere: Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly) gets flooded.

Jennifer Connelly fights off a bad-mom complex and a leaky apartment.

by Cindy Fuchs

In Dahlia's world, it's always raining. This is no rejuvenating spring rain, either, but dreary and sad, the sort of rain that appears in movies to mark loss and funerals, and children's feelings of abandonment. Just so, Dahlia first appears in Dark Water as a child waiting for her mother to pick her up from school. She stands on the sidewalk, her kneesocks pushed down around her slender ankles, her hip cocked in weary expectation, her umbrella hovering more than protecting.

In another movie, Dahlia's teacher would soothe her, but here, in Walter Salles' remake of director Hideo Nakata and writer Kôji Suzuki's 2002 film, she remains anonymous and distant, remarking in long shot that the girl's mother is always late. Cut forward from this "Seattle 1974" scene to "New York City 2005," and Dahlia, now grown up to be played by Jennifer Connelly, gazes out on still more rain. Again, she's waiting, this time for an appointment with divorce mediators. Her wayward about-to-be-ex Kyle (Dougray Scott) scolds her as soon as he arrives, as she hasn't even tried knocking, but only waited in the gloomy hallway.

In order to achieve a sense of independence, Dahlia and her precocious daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade) take an apartment some distance from Jersey City, where Kyle lives near his girlfriend, on Roosevelt Island. Here it not only rains outside, but also in; while touring the premises, Dahlia notes leaks in the grimly grindy elevator as well as Ceci's bedroom ceiling. Manager Mr. Murray (John C. Reilly) is distracted and off-putting ("The bathroom's pretty self-explanatory"), as is the surly super, Veeck (Pete Postlethwaite). And it takes only a glance around to see it's a frankly creepy apartment, the sort of place where David Lynch's characters tend to live; as Ceci puts it, "There's no air in here." But Dahlia, apparently still waiting — metaphorically, of course — to be picked up at school, hesitates.

Meantime, Ceci heads to the rooftop in pursuit of a ghostish presence with a particular affection for a pink Hello Kitty backpack. (This would be Natasha, played by Perla Haney-Jardine, who used to live upstairs and whose sad family photo has been left behind.) On her return to the ground floor, Ceci endures a panicky dressing-down from Mom, then makes the case for taking the apartment anyway ("I really want to move here"). Dahlia rationalizes the decision by pointing to the great school two blocks away, even though it's "insanely inconvenient" for Kyle. Indeed, his accusations are oddly ferocious ("I don't know who pressed our wacko button today," he snarks, as Dahlia cringes) while he's supposedly trying to work out a joint custody arrangement.

Dark Water hits this dysfunctional mother nerve repeatedly, not only in spats with Kyle, which insinuate an awful history even as they suggest that it's her perspective shaping the scene. In this, Salles' movie adopts the immersive subjectivity that makes J-horror so unnerving, so nightmarish. The spaces Dahlia inhabits — past and present, inside and outside, night and day — start to blur, as she's either beginning to believe or project Kyle's pronouncements. Their interactions are increasingly framed by her own bad-mom flashbacks (with her head pitched into the toilet, this alcoholic tells child-Dahlia that she "hates" her) and her bumpy relationship with her daughter, whose teacher (Camryn Manheim) urges Dahlia to be concerned that Ceci is spending too much time with her "imaginary friend." When Dahlia finally "loses a day" to a headache and forgets to pick up Ceci at school, the distinctions between Mom's subjective and material experiences are quite erased. It hardly helps that the upstairs apartment, supposedly vacated, is flooded daily, with literally dark and odious water that seeps into Dahlia's home through a hole that looks almost organic.

And yet all this lurid illogic is actually less troubling than the movie's occasional efforts to insert order (ironically, perhaps) in the form of a lawyer named Platzer (Tim Roth), who takes Dahlia's case against her landlord. His advice might be fine — he warns her to temper her descriptions of disagreements so she doesn't accommodate Kyle's lawyers' assertions that she's suffering from "paranoid delusions."

What shakes Dahlia most, however, is the charge that Ceci is "starting to share your fantasies." Dahlia absorbs this notion, as she must, as a reinforcement of her sense of being cursed — in a psychological, chemically imbalanced or traumatized way. Being a horror movie (and a very good-looking one, even for all its tricks and annoyances), Dark Water can't grant her a solution, or even much of an objective correlative for her suffering. (Platzer is more a distraction than a plot mechanism.) Certainly, horror's use of the bad-mom hook is only partly a function of this moment; guilty mothers have been villains as well as self-sacrificers for eons. What makes this movie both disappointing and intriguing is that it tries so hard to complicate this hook, then drops it flat, leaving the bad mom to her own very conventional devices. And so, it seems, she's still waiting.

Dark Water Directed by Walter Salles
A Buena Vista release
Opens Friday at area theaters