Ghouls Out for Summer
Jennifer Connelly Raises Dark Water’s Terror Level

When a film starts with a so-so script, it takes a Herculean effort from the actors, director and film crew to elevate it beyond its meager beginnings on the page. That rarely happens, and when it does you have to think of what might have been had the actors had a tighter script behind them.

“This is exactly why parakeets and ceiling fans don’t mix.” Ariel Gade and Jennifer Connelly star in the new suspense movie Dark Water.

Such is the case with the new modern gothic movie Dark Water, starring Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Connelly. She gives a stellar performance and makes the film a truly memorable experience despite its lean storyline.

Connelly stars as Dahlia, a newly single mother in New York City who is engaged in a nasty custody battle with her ex, Kyle (Dougray Scott), while also trying to find affordable housing for herself and her daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade). Dahlia has some pretty weighty emotional baggage from her own bleak childhood and is doing her best to protect Ceci from a similar fate.

Mom and daughter find a rent-controlled apartment across the bridge from the city on Roosevelt Island. The rain-soaked images of the island and its Communist-style architecture are presented in depressing shots of grainy gray and black. It is an effective mood-setter and background for the rest of the story.

At first Ceci is resistant to moving into the old building on Roosevelt Island, but once she finds an abandoned Hello Kitty backpack on the roof, she changes her tune. She settles into a routine at a nearby school while her mother takes a job with a medical insurance firm.

Before long, their new apartment building takes on a life of its own with its constantly dripping water, rickety elevator and weird noises. How much of the building’s terror is real and how much is in Dahlia’s head is debatable and her ex-husband begins to exploit her paranoid state in the custody battle.

Dark Water gets a lot of its strength from a fine supporting cast including Scott, John C. Reilly as the apartment rep, Tim Roth as Dahlia’s attorney, and the fabulous Pete Postlethwaite as the building’s super, Veeck. Film fans will remember him as the mysterious Kobayashi in The Usual Suspects and as Guiseppe Conlon in In the Name of the Father.

But the real stars are Connelly and Gade. Their chemistry as mother and daughter have a lot to do with how the audience feels about what happens to Dahlia and Ceci, particularly during the harrowing last fifteen minutes of the movie.

Dark Water director Walter Salles has been a movie buff since childhood and has always had a special place in his heart for ghost stories. In this movie he creates a multi-layered spectral experience as Dahlia is haunted by the ghosts of her past who dwell in her head as well as by other beings inhabiting the gloomy ten-story apartment building on Roosevelt Island.

“Ghost stories were especially intriguing, because of the way they dealt with one’s fear of the unknown—and the fear of the other,” said Salles about the movies he grew up watching. “Only later, when I read an interview that Stanley Kubrick gave to Michel Ciment on The Shining, did I rationally understand what attracted the public to this genre. ‘The unconscious appeal of a ghost story lies in the promise of immortality. It resonates not only because we are afraid of ghosts, but because, if we fear them, then we must accept the possibility that there is more than just oblivion waiting beyond the grave,’ he said.”

In conclusion, Dark Water is a fine summer movie in the creepy suspense mode as opposed to the true horror genre. A little tinkering with the script and maybe more of a back story might have given the audience a fuller emotional investment into the lives of Dahlia, Ceci and, in particular, Natasha. While perhaps not as scary as The Ring, it is far superior to The Ring 2 and The Grudge. Heck, any movie that can turn a Hello Kitty backpack into a frightening recurring image deserves high marks for enjoyable audience manipulation.

Dark Water is rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, frightening sequences, disturbing images and brief language. It is currently playing at Regal Cinemas in Boone.