Recently separated Dahlia Williams gets a new job and a new apartment that she moves to with her daughter. The apartment is kinda worn-out and leaks water among other things. Soon strange things starts to happen and the black water seems to appear for her everywhere, driving her imagination to run wild. Also, while trying to keep herself together, her daughter seems to have got some strange imaginary friend.
I knew that this remake was gonna be bad, but since I really liked the original Japanese Dark Water, it felt like I just had to check out the American version. I'm actually quite sorry that I did, mostly that I wasted my time. Like I said, I was guessing it was gonna turn out bad but it was actually worse that I first had thought it would be. When watching this, you have the Japanese original flick in mind and you're bound to compare them even if you don't really want to. And by doing so, this one fails big-time.
On the other hand, it seemed like a lot of people actually really appreciated this movie, not for being a horror movie, but for being a very strong drama. It's somewhat understandable, but personally, I still think it's close to being shite anyway. Even if it's a strong drama, it still has the same story as the Japanese version so we really don't get anything new here, and that's boring for sure.
 
Jennifer Connelly is a great actress and is very good in the role of Dahlia Williams, but it doesn't really matter how good of an actress she is, the movie's still boring. Compared to Hideo Nakata's original, it ends up feeling like just watching complete crap.
So with this movie being more of a drama than an actual horror movie also means that everything that's scary is not that scary. It has a few horror elements in it but does so not deliver on the horror front. The very few times it's supposed to actually be really scary, everything just goes down the drain and you end up feeling cheated, over and over again. I can admit that the movie has some good atmosphere going for it, and might even come close to being somewhat eerie at times. But unfortunately it never goes anywhere, and you find yourself just sitting around waiting for things that never gonna happen.
One thing that is really boring too is that you know what's gonna happen from having seen the Japanese version. So if they had made things a bit different it would've been nice, but here it's just the same tired plot. At least The Ring added some different stuff to it that actually made it a little bit different and therefore more interesting to watch. The outcome is a totally different thing, here I'm just talking about watching a new movie without knowing every single thing that's gonna occur.
Ok so this is not to be taken as a real horror flick, but the fact remains and that is that it still sucks, no matter what it tries to be. The actual lack of originality is overwhelming and even if it's nicely shot, has good actors and sometimes a very good atmosphere, it's still a snore.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 2005
DIRECTOR: Walter Salles
WRITING CREDITS: Kôji Suzuki, Hideo Nakata
GENRE: Horror, Drama, Thriller
CAST: Jennifer Connelly, John C. Reilly, Tim Roth
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 105 min
RATING: 3/10
Dark Water Website/IMDB Click here
Dark Water Trailer Click here
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