I'm getting a little sick of psychological thrillers being promoted as horror movies. THEY ARE NOT THE SAME FUCKING THING! Horror movies are supposed to scare the shit out of you from opening to closing credits. They're supposed to be full of gore, stupidity and an outrageous scenerio that could (almost) never happen. Psychological thrillers are a mind fuck. They keep you on edge with a rapid heart beat, fearing that something will jump out of somewhere and cause you to shit yourself, though your underwear doesn't need changing when you leave the theater.
Dark Water is the work of The Ring writer Koji Suzuki, who wrote this as a novel before Rafael Yglesias turned it into a screenplay. Both this and The Ring are pretty similar, making it seem as if Suzuki wrote a novel he thought would be safe. Dahlia (Jennifer Connely), a recently divorced mother moves to a shithole in Rosevelt Island, NY. Her daughter, Ceci (Ariel Gade), complained about the move at first, but convinced her mom to take the apartment after finding a Hello Kitty backpack with a Barbie Doll insdie. I have no sympathy for either of their fates, as parent should know better than to listen to their seven year old children about where to live.
The best part of the film comes from a cameo by muMs da Schemer, who also played Poet on Oz. He wasn't in the movie for much longer than a minute, but I'm a huge Oz fan, so I enjoyed the familiar face (though I was hoping he'd be in more scenes).
The performances were all pretty good, especially the lawyer, Jeff Platzer (Tim Roth) and Ceci's dad, Kyle (Dougray Scott). Ceci was a little bit on the whiny side, which got annoying much too quickly, but Gade played the character well.
The ending was kind of stupid, which really hurt my enjoyment of this movie. It wasn't anything special to begin with, and the ending had it bordering the lame category.
Written by: RF