Dark Water

Hideo Nakata's film after Ring, again from a story by Koji Suzuki. Yoshimi is going through a divorce and fighting for custody of her daughter. The only place she can find is a cheap flat in a neglected block. Water is coming through the ceiling. The leak grows, the empty flat above is always wet, the lift keeps going to the same floor by itself, and a red bag the child finds keeps coming back however often it is thrown away. The fear does not come from a creature but from care: the sense that a woman alone has to hold on in order to keep her child, and that everything is working against her. Water, damp and stains are the visual form of that feeling. Hitomi Kuroki plays Yoshimi. The idiom of Japanese horror in this period holds here too: slow, quiet, not built on shocks, and sliding toward sorrow as it closes. It was remade in America by Walter Salles in 2005. One of the better examples of the genre for anyone who likes slowly built horror and mother-and-child drama. For a viewer wanting fast scares, almost nothing happens in the first hour.