Starring: Jennifer Connelly, Ariel Gade, John C. Reilly (I)

6 out of 10 stars

While it manages to insinuate itself into your mind and twist your emotions around until you're incredibly stressed out, Dark Water is a rather ineffective thriller, playing more like a dramatic movie about a chilling, nihilistic urban experience with a few supernatural elements thrown on top. As such, it manages to work best when it resorts to those details of a life coming slowly unhinged, but all those scary-type moments you might be expecting from the guy who wrote The Ring are rather toned-down and the central mystery at its core is a bit of a yawner. You'd never think to knock a thriller for being too nuanced, but Dark Water is all about nuances - granted, extremely well-done nuances by an incredibly talented cast. But in ultimately forsaking its dramatic core for a rather standard horror ending, the movie cuts itself short both ways. It's neither scary enough nor gritty enough, and you're left wrung out but not scared out of your wits.

You could blame it all on director Walter Salles (The Motorcyle Diaries), who seems more interested in probing the mind of his unstable heroine instead of the ghosts in her apartment, or writer Rafael Yglesias (Fearless), who cares more about creating fascinating characters than suspenseful scenarios, but "blame" isn't exactly the right word. "Nice try" comes close, as you can see both are attempting to flesh out the dynamics of the story they've been given (based on a 2002 Japanese film) and seem to enjoy playing around with the tale's standard thriller dynamics. But those fill-in-the-blank areas, while interesting unto themselves, aren't really in the service of the movie's main story; rather, they appear to be building up Dark Water's subtext so that it almost erases the story it's trying to tell. So instead of getting Scary Urban Ghost Story, you wind up with Welcome to Jennifer Connelly's Nervous Breakdown.

Am I the only one who misses the beautiful, funny, hypnotic, dreamier-than-dreamy Jennifer Connelly? This amazingly talented and gorgeous actress, who's ridden an improbable career wave from The Rocketeer all the way to an Academy Award, has been aggressively making a career out of becoming The Unstable Hot Chick, undergoing nervous breakdown after nervous breakdown. And whether it's opposite a crazy economist or a genetically altered green dude or a fiercely protective Iranian, it's beginning to get a little long in the tooth. Here, Connelly goes for something between her whacked-out hot homeless woman from House of Sand and Fog and her depressed scientist babe from Hulk, as her Dahlia Williams is obviously a nice, normal lady who's just fallen upon some extremely bad times. Separated from her touchy husband (Dougray Scott), she's in truly desperate straits - she has no money, she's looking for a new job, and she has to find a new home for her and her daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade) immediately. Add to that a not-so-hot childhood and a penchant for migraines, and you might be stressed out, too.

However, you might not, as Dahlia does, choose the most dank, ugly, and oppressive apartment in New York City to live in. Venturing out to Roosevelt Island, where it never stops raining and all the buildings are cement behemoths, Dahlia is pretty much tricked into putting down a deposit on apartment 9F, seeing as the building's real estate shyster (John C. Reilly) adroitly plays her, and little Ceci, after initially balking at the location's ugliness, is seduced into being a cheerleader for the hovel, thanks to a mysterious Hello Kitty backpack and, we suspect, something a little more sinister and a little less corporeal. After Dahlia and Ceci move in, they notice that the dark spot on their bedroom ceiling - the one that was supposed to be fixed - is getting bigger and wetter and, you guessed it, darker. You can't blame the folks in 10F - they're supposed to be gone. So who's turning on the water? Again and again?

It's after all this set-up that Salles starts playing around with Dahlia's paranoia, and much like Rosemary's Baby, you begin to wonder if she just has an overactive imagination or if everyone around her is in on a plot to drive her crazy. The unhelpful building super (Pete Postlethwaite) gives Dahlia a disparaging eye whenever she asks for help; the real estate guy drags his heels; her husband forsakes mediation for an all-out custody battle; and some creepily realistic dream sequences have Dahlia questioning her own sanity. When the voices of a little girl name Natasha start bedeviling both Dahlia and Ceci, it's hard to tell whether there's really some nasty ghost around or if Dahlia is just getting more and more unstable, with her daughter following in her mother's shaky footsteps.

Connelly, despite having done this one too many times before, gives Dahlia's slow unhinging a nice subtlety and sympathy, two things most definitely missing from her performance in House of Sand and Fog, which is cut from the same cloth, albeit on a more ragged edge. Watching Dahlia slowly lose control of her life and her mind is almost like watching a steadily moving car veer in a seamless, diagonal line across four lanes, moving forward all the time but slowly losing its grip on exactly where it's going. While you feel Dahlia's pain and stress at possibly losing her daughter, it's more because you're worried that the evil ex-hubby is going to swoop in and nab her, not because some ghost is feeling rather possessive. And in fact, everyone in this movie seems to be putting Dark Water's supposed supernatural doings on the back burner. It works up to a point - Postlethwaite is hiding a secret, Reilly is a perfect nightmare of ineffectuality, little Gade is more worried about her mom than her invisible friend - but when the plot mechanics ultimately kick in, Dark Water loses most of its power, and what was an effective meltdown turns into a rather tedious fight with the dark side that cribs quite a bit from both The Ring and The Grudge.

Besides Connelly, the one person who manages to lift Dark Water every now and then above its genre station is Tim Roth, almost unrecognizable as a slightly mysterious lawyer who takes on Dahlia's custody case. Despite living out of his SUV, he's nonetheless one of the more fastidious and hard-working attorneys seen lately on the screen, and injects his scenes with street-smarts and sympathy. In a movie that lives off of a jumble of chaotic emotions, he's the only calm center, and his performance is nice little jolt of humanity in between all the crazy and stylish goings-on. He's the closest thing to a hero in a movie that, in all honesty, needs rescuing of some kind in order to give it a full identity.