Dark Water (2002 movie)
Darkwater2002movieposter.jpg
Dark Water is a 2002 Japanese horror film directed by Hideo Nakata, who is better known as the director of Ringu and Ringu 2, and based on a work by Koji Suzuki. Its Japanese name is Honogurai mizu no soko kara (仄暗い水の底から).
Plot
The plot involves a woman in the midst of an unpleasant divorce who moves to an eerie run-down apartment building with her young daughter. The ceiling of their apartment develops a leak, which progressively worsens, and the daughter finds an unfamiliar red bag while playing on the building's roof. The woman is disturbed to discover that the upstairs apartment that appears to be the source of the leak was formerly the home of a young girl of similar age to her daughter. That child had attended the same kindergarten her daughter now attends, had been abandoned by her mother and vanished more than a year before. The child had also owned a red bag.
Sensing something untoward, the woman disposes of the bag; however, it reappears. Again the woman disposes of the bag, and again it reappears, establishing a pattern that becomes increasingly panicked, and driving the woman to the point of nervous hysteria, which in turn threatens her continued custody of her daughter. After a traumatic culmination to these events, when the daughter disappears, only to be found wandering in the flooded upstairs apartment - apparently lured there by the apparition of the vanished child - a sympathetic lawyer teams with the woman to try to relieve her fears. For a time he succeeds in convincing her that the events she has experienced have natural causes.
One evening the mother is drawn to the roof of the building, and there uncovers the dark secret that lies at the heart of the events to which she is now inextricably involved; examining the building's water tank she notices that it was last inspected over a year previously - just before the vanished child was last seen - and comes to the sudden horrific realisation that the missing child had in fact drowned in the tank while trying to retrieve her red bag, which had fallen inside. The tank had since become the home to the child's malevolent spirit, spreading its evil via the building's plumbing and seeking in death a replacement for the mother who had abandoned it in life.
Intent on immediately escaping the building the woman rushes back to her apartment only to find her daughter in danger of being drowned in the bathtub. Clutching the child to her chest she rushes in panic from the apartment and into the building's elevator, with the aparation in dogged pursuit. As the door to the elevator closes she sees that the figure pursuing her is in fact her own daughter - and realises that the lift's other occupant is in fact the reanimated corpse of the drowned child, claiming her for its mother at last.
The film's theme of a drowned innocent transmorgifying into a malevolent spiritual force is almost identical to that of Ringu - although the immediate cause of death in this case is accidental.
2005 remake
A U.S. remake of the film, directed by Walter Salles and starring Jennifer Connelly, is due out on July 8, 2005. See Dark Water (2005 movie)