Dark Water

After her traumatic experience with the House of Sand and Fog, Jennifer Connelly ought to have learned some lessons about real estate. Yet virtually her first action in Dark Water is to sign a lease on a run-down apartment with no light and a weirdly evolving damp patch on the bedroom ceiling.

Mr Murray, the fast-talking building manager (an unctuous John C Reilly), promises a plumber and an immediate paint job; but that still leaves a creepy super (Pete Postlethwaite), a self-willed elevator, and an ominous rooftop water tower to be dealt with. For Connelly's characters, home is where the problems are.

This particular home is on Roosevelt Island and Connelly is Dahlia, the anxious mother of a five-year-old named Ceci (Ariel Gade). We meet her in the middle of a bitter custody battle with her overbearing husband, Kyle (M:I-2's Dougray Scott), who believes his wife is unstable. Dahlia suffers from migraines, a lingering symptom of her own troubled childhood, and needs to prove she can make a home for Ceci. The dingy Roosevelt Island apartment is all she can afford, but as the tram glides over the East River and their new home - a massive slab of filthy residential concrete - materialises through curtains of rain, Ceci becomes distressed. "We're not in Manhattan!" she wails. Indeed we're not.

Where we are, in fact, is inside the coldly gifted mind of Japanese writer Koji Suzuki, whose short story Floating Water was the inspiration for the original Dark Water, directed by Hideo Nakata in 2002. The team of Suzuki and Nakata (Ringu and Ringu 2) revels in stories about single mothers, misplaced children and abandonment in general; and here, in the hands of director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) and screenwriter Rafael Yglesias (Fearless), those issues are framed by a very Western quest for independence and psychological stability. As Dahlia finds a job, enrols Ceci in a nearby kindergarten and participates in custody mediation, the movie weaves a delicate web of dread around mother and child that cleverly underscores the insecurities of single parenthood.

But Dark Water is a horror movie, not a family drama, and before long Dahlia is hearing noises in the unoccupied apartment above and Ceci is chatting with an invisible friend. The damp patch is spreading, the elevator keeps rising, unbidden, to the 10th floor and a child's backpack refuses to be thrown away. A friendly lawyer (Tim Roth) tries to help, but he's confused by Dahlia's erratic behavior. Are her blackouts evidence of deeper mental problems? Is her husband paying thugs to harrass her? Where is the family she claims is missing from the upstairs apartment? Will the rain ever stop?

The answers to these questions are beside the point: Dark Water needs to be about mood, not plot resolution. Nakata's film (at least until its jarringly sentimental coda) was a slight, unnerving fairytale sustained by an atmosphere of encircling evil. But you can't hire a star as luminous as Jennifer Connelly, then subordinate her to ambience. So this time - as is often the case with East-to-West remakes - explicitness trumps subtlety and Salles elects to spell out what Nakata merely suggested. And while this added substance provides Connelly with considerably more dramatic options than her Japanese counterpart, the story is ultimately too flimsy to withstand our increased scrutiny.

Filmed in New York and Toronto, Dark Water benefits enormously from the spectacular production designs of Therese DePrez (American Splendor), which bring to life a world literally drenched in moisture. Walls weep, ceilings drip, taps gush and bathtubs overflow - every scene in the film seems to squelch. Watching Connelly wade miserably through rooms awash with mold-colored water, we can only hope her next movie is a happier - and drier - affair. A remake of Lawrence of Arabia, perhaps?