Wow, that was one long boring movie. The original "Dark Water" was one of the better Asian horror movies. Not very logical, but creepy and effective. American remakes tend to take the original premise and go over the top with it. That's not at all the case with this movie. Walter Salles' version of "Dark Water" is even more stripped of any shock elements. You have to give him credit for trying to make the movie his own instead of copying the original sequence by sequence, but Salles cut the best scenes out and his attempts to create atmosphere aren't successful at all. Just because it's raining all the time and the whole film is covered in dark green/gray doesn't automatically make it atmospheric. It's just an inanely obvious way to build a theme that matches the title. The story itself moves so slowly and uneventfully that we are virtually (and vainly) begging for some cheap scare to keep us interested. There are no plot points whatsoever. Characters are introduced arbitrarily, they do things without a reason and in the end we're presented a solution that's only slightly explicable if you've seen the original and know what the story is supposed to be about. Jennifer Connelly and the rest of the fine cast do their best to save "Dark Water", but they're fighting against windmills. This movie couldn't even scare my girlfriend and that's saying a lot, because she is freaked out by even the tamest ghost stories. So, don't waste your time on this and go see the original instead.
Review of Dark Water
