Movie Review: Dark Water (2002)

Dark Water (2002) co-written and directed by Hideo Nakata

Yoshimi (Hitomi Kuroki) is getting divorced and her husband is only contesting one thing--custody of their five year-old daughter Iku (Rio Kanno). Yoshimi is struggling to get on her feet, still looking for a place to live and for a job. Her real estate agent (Yu Tokui) takes her to a few places. She settles on a third floor apartment in a somewhat rundown building. She has a hard time juggling the responsibilities (home, job, and divorce) while also picking up her daughter from school. If that wasn't bad enough, the apartment ceiling has a leak and the upstairs neighbor is a bit noisy, running around. She asks the building manager to repair the ceiling but he just writes it down in his log. She goes to the apartment above her but no one answers the door. As she's on the elevator going back down, she sees a glimpse of a youngster in a yellow raincoat peek out the door. Meanwhile, her husband is bringing up all Yoshimi's bad history--she needed therapy after working too hard at a proofreading job where she was assigned all the grisly horror and thriller novels. As a child, she developed sleepwalking for a short time while her own parents divorced. He's trying to make her look unfit for custody. The weird stuff at the apartment only adds to her difficulty. There's a missing child poster for a girl in a yellow raincoat and the constantly reappearing kid's red purse that may be from the missing child. Iku likes the bag and wants to keep it but mom is unnerved by it.

This movie is definitely part of the "wet ghost girl" Japanese horror craze in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The movie does a great job leaving the viewer questioning whether there really is a ghost or the lady is just going crazy. The movie is anchored by Kuroki and Kanno's performances. The mother is both sympathetic and a bit neglectful, the viewer easily sees how the husband doesn't trust her to take care of their child. She overreacts to things. Kanno is also excellent as the child caught in the middle of the divorce and the conflict over a haunting she does not understand. The movie has almost no special effects, relying on sound design and the slow unfolding of the situation to provide the chills. The low-key menace must have been effective because at one point I thought about turning a light on. I had the visceral reaction that the filmmakers were going for. The ending provides some melancholic relief and ends the story nicely.

Recommended--I saw this on Kanopy.