Ghost Movies

Dark Water is a 2005 American drama-horror film directed by Walter Salles and starring Jennifer Connelly. The film is a remake of the 2002 Japanese film of the same name, and also stars John C. Reilly, Tim Roth, Perla Haney-Jardine and Ariel Gade. The film is based on the short story Floating Water from the horror anthology Honogurai mizu no soko kara by Koji Suzuki, author of Ring (which also had an American remake).

Plot

When the film opens, the audience sees a young girl standing outside after school in the rain, waiting for her mother, who has yet to show up. The scene is dated 1975.

Flash forward to 2005, we see a grown-up Dahlia in the midst of a bitter mediation with her ex-husband, Kyle, over sharing custody of their daughter, Cecilia, also known as Ceci. Kyle wants Cecilia to live closer to his apartment in Jersey City so the joint-custody agreement would be easier, but Dahlia wants to move to Roosevelt Island, where she has found a good school for Cecilia. Kyle threatens to sue for full custody because he feels the distance to see his daughter is too great. He claims that Dahlia is an “unfit” mother because she was abused by her father and abandoned by her mother at a young age. He also claims that Dahlia is “mentally unstable” and suffers from debilitating migraines, though Dahlia insists the migraines are not severe. Dahlia shouts that Kyle “doesn’t even remember Cecilia’s birthday and that he doesn’t even like playing with her”.

Dahlia and Cecilia see an apartment in a complex on Roosevelt Island, which is just a few blocks from Cecilia’s new school. The super of the apartment building is Mr. Veeck, who is charged with the general maintenance of the building’s many lacking features. The manager, Mr. Murray, uses questionable tactics in order to rent the substandard and undersized apartment. During the tour, Cecilia sneaks up onto the roof where she finds a Hello Kitty backpack near a large water tank. They leave the bag with Mr. Veeck, and Mr. Murray promises Cecilia that she can have it if no one claims it in a week. Cecilia, who has disliked the apartment from the moment she arrived, now wants desperately to live there. Dahlia agrees and they move in.

Shortly after moving in, the ceiling in the bedroom begins to leak dark water. The source is the apartment above, 10F, where a family, the Rimskys, lived up until a month ago. Since then, two teens have reportedly been vandalizing the apartment. At one point, Dahlia enters 10F and finds the place flooded, with dark water flowing from every faucet in the apartment and from the walls and toilet. Dahlia finds a family portrait of the former tenants. There is a mother, father, and young girl who looks about Cecilia’s age. Dahlia complains to both Mr. Veeck and Mr. Murray about the water, but the former does little about it despite the insistence of the latter. Things become even more strange for Dahlia when she has dreams of a little girl who appears to be Cecilia returning from a visit to her father’s home, but the girl’s appearance changes every time Dahlia looks away from her in the dream, so that she looks like the young girl in the portrait in 10F.

Cecilia has started school, but according to her new teacher, she isn’t fitting in with the class and is spending too much time with an imaginary friend, named Natasha. A psychologist is recommended, but Dahlia refuses and tells Cecilia to ignore Natasha. This is made more difficult when Dahlia discovers the Hello Kitty backpack in the laundry room’s garbage, although Mr. Veeck had said it was claimed. Dahlia leaves it in the garbage, but Cecilia finds it– in the elevator. The name in the backpack reads “Natasha Rimsky”.

The ceiling, shoddily patched up by Mr. Veeck, begins to leak again, but more heavily than before. At school, Cecilia appears to get into a fight with Natasha, who appears to control Cecilia’s hand while painting. She’s taken to the girls’ bathroom where she passes out after dark water starts gushing from the toilets and sinks. Dahlia, who is meeting with her lawyer, can’t be reached at work, so Kyle picks her up from the hospital and takes her to his apartment without telling Dahlia.

Dahlia breaks down when she can’t find her daughter and begins having strange dreams. These lead her back onto the roof and up the ladder of the water tank. She looks inside and finds Natasha’s body in there. When the police arrive, they discover that there was a grave miscommunication between the Rimskys; the father thought that Natasha was with her mother while the mother thought the girl was with her father. The father was an alcoholic who was known for always shouting, and the mom was no better. The mother left because she didn’t feel she could care for Natasha, and the father left soon afterward, somehow under the impression that Natasha was with her mother. The girl was left alone in the abandoned apartment and fell into the water tank, which Mr. Veeck had left open. He was aware of her body, which was why he refused to fix the water problem plaguing the complex. Mr. Veeck is arrested and Mr. Murray is questioned.

Dahlia agrees to move closer to Kyle so the shared custody will go easier. As Dahlia is packing, Cecilia is taking a bath. A girl in a hooded bathrobe comes out of the bathroom, wanting to read with Dahlia. Dahlia begins reading, but when she hears voices in the bathroom, she realizes that the girl in the bathrobe is Natasha. Natasha begs Dahlia not to leave her, but Dahlia rushes into the bathroom to save Cecilia. Natasha then locks Cecilia in the bathtub (which has a shatterproof panel instead of a curtain) and holds her underwater. Dahlia pleads with Natasha, promising to be her mother forever. Natasha lets Cecilia go and floods the apartment, causing Dahlia to drown and fulfill her promise. Her ghost and that of Natasha then walk down the hallway.

Kyle picks up the traumatized Cecilia from the police station, and weeks later, the two go back to pick up the rest of her stuff. Cecilia has a flashback of her and her mother looking at pictures together, and in the elevator, her mother’s ghost braids her hair and comforts her– telling her she will always be there. Kyle, momentarily horrified with a malfunction in the elevator, the weird behavior of his daughter, and perhaps noticing her hair had been braided while in the elevator, finally takes her away to his own apartment in Jersey City.

Dark Water is a 2002 Japanese horror film directed by Hideo Nakata, the director of Ring and Ring 2. Dark Water is based on Floating Water, a short story by Koji Suzuki. Its Japanese name is Honogurai mizu no soko kara , which is also the name of the horror anthology by Koji Suzuki. There is also a manga adaptation that holds little similarity to the film, although the apartment building is identical.

Plot

The plot involves a woman, Yoshimi Matsubara (Hitomi Kuroki), who, in the midst of an unpleasant divorce, moves to an eerie run-down apartment building with her young daughter, Ikuko (Rio Kanno). The ceiling of their apartment has a dark and active leak. Yoshimi discovers that the upstairs apartment, which appears to be the source of the leak, was formerly the home of a young girl named Mitsuko Kawai (Mirei Oguchi), who was of similar age to her daughter. The child had attended the same kindergarten Ikuko now attends. Mitsuko was abandoned by her mother and vanished more than a year ago. She also had owned a red bag which was the same bag that Ikuko found on the apartment roof when first viewing the apartment.

Many incidents then happen repetitively, becoming stranger each time. The red bag is disposed of, but then found by Ikuko on the roof; Yoshimi throws it away again, only to find it herself later. The bag fills Yoshimi with a sense of dread that she is unable to explain. The leak in the ceiling worsens. Hair is found in tap water. Yoshimi gets glimpses of a girl looking like Mitsuko. Ikuko passes out at school, then in the apartment upstairs, where water is pouring heavily from the walls.

From the beginning, the audience is shown the involvement of a supernatural girl, but Yoshimi only gradually believes it. Her growing hysteria could lose her the right to keep her daughter, so her lawyer pressures her not to panic. At one point she decides to move away, but her lawyer convinces her that someone is playing tricks on her and that moving now would weaken her position in her divorce, so she stays.

One evening, after yet another strange occurrence involving the red bag, Yoshimi is drawn to the roof of the building, and there discovers the truth about Mitsuko. While examining the building’s water tank she notices that it was last inspected – and thus opened – over a year ago, the day Mitsuko was last reported to be seen. She comes to the sudden horrific realization via a vision that Mitsuko had fallen into the tank while trying to retrieve her red bag, and then drowned. The tank had since become the home to the child’s spirit, eventually seeking in death a replacement for the mother who had abandoned it in life.

Meanwhile, Ikuko, who has been left alone in the apartment, vainly attempts to turn off the bath taps, which have suddenly started to spurt filthy, brown water. Mitsuko’s sprit then emerges from the bathtub and attempts to drown Ikuko.

Intending to immediately escape the building, Yoshimi rushes back to her apartment only to find Ikuko unconscious on the bathroom floor, in danger of dying from her attempted drowning. Clutching her child to her chest she rushes from the apartment and into the building’s elevator, fleeing from the apparition of Mitsuko. But as the door to the elevator closes she sees that the figure pursuing her is in fact her own daughter – and realizes that who she carried with her was not her own daughter but the ghost/reanimated corpse of Mitsuko who now wishes to claim Yoshimi as her own mother in a torrent of water. With Ikuko looking on in tears, Yoshimi sacrifices herself by staying to appease Mitsuko, and thus saving her daughter.

The last moments of the film shows Ikuko, who is now sixteen years old (Asami Mizukawa), visiting the (now abandoned) apartment block. As she walks around, she notices that her old apartment looks oddly clean. She then sees her mother, and they have a conversation. Ikuko remembers that her mother once told her that as long as she was with her, she’d be all right. She inquires if she still feels this way, which her mother affirms. She then pleads to stay with her mother. Yoshimi smiles, but tells Ikuko that she’s sorry it can’t happen. At the same time, Mitsuko can be seen standing behind Ikuko. Sensing someone behind her, Ikuko warily turns around, but sees no one. When she turns back again, Yoshimi has also disappeared. As she leaves the apartment block, Ikuko realises that her mother’s spirit has been watching over her.

The film’s theme of a drowned innocent child transforming into a malevolent spiritual force is almost identical to that of Ring, although in Ring the spirit (Sadako Yamamura) returns to avenge her death while Mitsuko seeks companionship.