Dark Water

“Some mysteries were never meant to be solved.” And also, some movies were never meant to be made.

God this movie was boring. So very, very boring. I have to say, I’m extremely disappointed with Dark Water, I really thought it was going to terrify me. The preview for this movie frightened me the first time I saw it, and ever since then I have been eagerly, if not nervously, anticipating its release. Dark Water starts out normally enough, with the usual introduction of the characters and a few slight indications that the apartment they are about to rent is decidedly haunted. I kept waiting for the movie to gain some momentum after the standard introduction, but unfortunately that is one thing that Dark Water severely lacked.

A single mother, Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly), and her daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade) move into a cheap apartment just outside New York City as Dahlia and her husband are in the midst of a nasty divorce. There’s something about a custody battle and Dahlia’s internal issues with her absent mother or something, but these plot points are solely intended to add some dimension to the characters. I say, who cares about the characters, just get to scaring the hell out of me! Dahlia immediately notices a nasty leak in her bedroom ceiling but can’t get the building manager to fix it. Instead of focusing on the ghost that is obviously creating the leak of evil, the movie chooses to focus on the landlord/tenant dispute of who’s going to fix that leak? I wish I could tell you what happens from there, but unfortunately there’s nothing left to tell. The scary Ghost Leak continues to grow, Dahlia fights with the building manager some more about fixing it, and Dahlia's daughter Ceci finally decides that someone should probably pay attention to the ghost upstairs who is supposed to be the whole point of the movie. Ceci gets to talk to the ghost and see the ghost in typical child fashion, but the audience is denied this frightening pleasure. We are forced to instead continue following Dahlia with her custody and landlord woes. Great, this was exactly the movie I signed up for.

The entire film consists of tiny little scares here and there, with the spirit of some dead girl unenthusiastically terrorizing Dahlia while boring the hell out of the audience. Seriously, there was never any point in the movie where I felt a build up of suspense beyond the two or three seconds when something jumped out at the audience. The viewer finally finds out at the very end who the little ghost girl is, why she died, how she died, what her shoe size is, etc..., but it’s completely anticlimactic. It wasn’t clever or disturbing, as any self-respecting horror movie would choose to end, but mindless and drab. I didn’t care what happened to the main characters, and I was disappointed with how little haunting the spirit actually did. The leak comes and goes, water turns dark, but that’s basically all that happens.

True, this review might be a little harsher than necessary, but when I go to a movie expecting that it will scare the crap out of me, I feel pretty annoyed afterward when I can’t think of one truly scary moment during the whole film. I mocked my date for smuggling alcohol into the theater, but afterward I was irritated that I didn’t have the same mental cushion that he did.