Dark Water (2002)

Such a frustrating disappointment

A Masterpiece!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

I found this a creepy and psychological horror from Japan. It wasn't especially original compared to Ring (1998) but it was fittingly scary. It didn't make me jump but I was grabbing hold of anything tightly so that I wouldn't feel so scared. There was one amazingly scary moment. I found the end part of it pretty confusing although I can excuse that because of all the fear and tense atmosphere that was built up with the sole purpose of giving the viewer some paranoid scary thoughts. Scary and enjoyable.

Huge horror fan so if your looking for a horror aficionado's take on the movie then read this brief review Good Story, eeriness abounds, decent scares yet lacking the punch that I neededMore chilling than scary I guess. Read some review so I watched it. Not gonna lie kinda disappointed. Solid story but other horror movies deal with similar themes and are just handled better. very dreary. almost too much. weather is shite in every scene. maybe if the movie was more stylized i would have liked it. Some decent scares but I watched shutter from Thailand the day before and that blew this out of the water in terms of scares. maybe biased on scare factor because shutter was so recently watchedIdk i cant say its bad. its definitely a decent movie but not great.

Divorcée Yoshimi Matsubara (Hitomi Kuroki) and her young daughter Ikuko (Rio Kanno) move into a run-down apartment block where they are haunted by the ghost of Mitsuko Kawai, an emotionally troubled little girl whose body has remained undiscovered since she accidentally drowned in the building's water storage tank two years earlier.Those who watch Hideo Nakata's Dark Water expecting a real fright-fest might be rather disappointed: it's a slow burner of a film that delivers a relentlessly brooding atmosphere, one of death and decay, but which is surprisingly short on nerve-jangling scares (unless, of course, you're freaked out by dripping water, red schoolbags, or six year old girls, in which case you'll be scared s**tless).Indeed, for most of the running time, Yoshimi or Ikuko never actually appear to be in any real danger from the film's restless spirit, their problems arising from far less ethereal sources, and it is only in the films closing moments that it becomes apparent that Mitsuko means to do Ikuko harm (so that she can claim Yoshimi as a surrogate mother) and the real horror begins.Although Nakata's direction is a little too languid in style for my taste, it is technically accomplished, with innovative camera-work and stunning cinematography throughout, and the cast give excellent performances; it might not have left me with the serious case of the jitters I had hoped for, but I had a reasonable enough time with Dark Water, and certainly recommend it over the dreary remake.

Another exceptional ghost story from Japan. The set-up on this one's familiar: a lonely mother, her precocious child, a creepy run-down apartment block haunted by the ghost of a little dark-haired girl. So far, so par for the course. Where the film excels is in two places: script and direction. The script delivers an ultimately moving, affecting story peopled by realistic characters we get to know and care about. Sure, there are no jump-in-your-seat moments as in some other Japanese ghost films, but they're not required; by the end, the film has turned into nothing less than a tragedy, and the horror is driven to the background.The direction is sublime (you'd expect as much, given that RING's Hideo Nakata is the man behind the lens). The dripping patch on the ceiling becomes monstrous in itself, and the atmosphere is palpable in every sequence. I loved the way that obvious scenes aren't shown, they don't need to be shown, the focus is on mood instead. Hollywood managed a decent remake of this, but even that had to show obvious stuff that wasn't required. Add in a cast giving top-notch performances and you have one of the finest the genre has to offer.