Nakata's leaky roof has hidden depths.
'Dark Water'(Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara) is Nakata Hideo's follow-up to his internationally acclaimed Ringu and Ringu 2. Yes, it's another horror movie and it's also based on a story by Suzuki Koji who wrote the Ringu cycle of novels. Both in style and theme Dark Water is remarkably similar to the previous movies. There's a little girl, her face obscured by long black hair, there's an obsession with water (In Ringu it was the ocean and, of course, the 'Well'. Here's it's leaking pipes and the mysterious Well-like water tower on the roof of heroine Hitomi Kuroki's apartment block.) Nakata also builds on the theme, present in Ringu (the movie but not the original novel) of a single mother determined to protect her child at all costs. In Ringu she was, ultimately, willing to sacrifice her own father. Here she's prepared to give up her sanity. The collapse of the nuclear family runs through all of these films but here it's given center stage and Nakata seems even more concerned with his theme than building up the atmosphere he did with the previous film. This is a character piece, it's more about terror than actually terrifying. Polanski's Repulsion comes to mind. This has the odd effect of making Dark Water strangely moving but not nearly as frightening as you know this director is capable of. The film gets it's tense, creep-out factor from seducing you into really caring about Yoshimi and her young daughter Ikuko (Another great Nakata-directed child performance from the cute Rio Kanno). The film also pilfers quite blatantly from Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now! with it's drowned Macintosh-clad ghost-child. Dark Water then, it's got nothing in it that'll mess with your nerves as much as that scene from Ringu but you'll never look at a leaky ceiling the same way and it's got the emotional resonance Nakata's earlier horror classic lacks.