Although few horror flicks employ the
city for their setting — Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s
Baby may be the most famous and most important — New York, especially
Manhattan, provides a propitious location for the exploration of various themes
and subtexts within the genre.
Sooner or later just about every
conversation there turns to the subject of real estate (in fact, one of the
topics of Polanski’s picture), especially the apartment somebody needs, has
found, or just missed out on, and of course, the astronomical rents. In Dark Water the apartment that a woman
named Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly) leases becomes in effect a major character and
the source of the story’s pervasive disquiet and ultimate terror.
The newly divorced Dahlia and her
young daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade) move into an apartment in a large complex on
Roosevelt Island in the East River, which initially seems an appropriate
location but of course rapidly turns sinister and menacing. Mysterious noises
from the supposedly empty apartment directly above them disturb mother and
daughter, the faucets sputter and spurt, and an alarming leak from above
creates a huge black spot on the bedroom ceiling. Ceci acquires an imaginary
friend, a little girl named Natasha who used to live in the leaking apartment.
Like a number of contemporary horror
films, Dark Water generates a good
deal of its emotional edginess from the claustrophobically intense familial
situation, in this case, the single mother and daughter involved in a bitter
custody battle with her ex-husband. Again following current trends, Dahlia
bears a considerable burden of pain from her own childhood, deriving from her
rejection and desertion by an alcoholic mother.
Three suffering children in fact
dominate the movie — young Dahlia, Ceci, and Natasha — sometimes merging
into a single entity, as Dahlia, haunted as much by her own past as by the
mysterious and frightening present, frequently dreams of herself as the lonely,
abandoned child.
The movie’s tension accumulates in
the time-honored fashion, with the careful and gradual depiction of the
sinister and frightening possibilities of the everyday. The elevator, the
corridors, the lobby, the laundry room all acquire a steadily increasing sense
of menace and provide innumerable small shocks to threaten Dahlia’s precarious
mental state. Worst of all, the leak rapidly grows larger, and the dark water
of the title gushes from the faucets and wells up out of sinks and toilets,
sometimes in reality, sometimes in Dahlia’s and Ceci’s imaginations.
The movie displays a New York very
different from the familiar locations and recognizable landmarks. The location
on Roosevelt Island, probably an unfamiliar place to most viewers, transforms
everything else in the film. A five-minute subway ride and a slightly longer
tram trip from Manhattan Island, the place seems disturbingly distant and
foreign.
The movie’s prologue, showing Dahlia
as a child, opens in Seattle, and the weather from the Northwest apparently
follows her East, so that it rains torrentially throughout, as if New York were
Bombay in the monsoon season, establishing a pervasive sense of drabness and of
course enough moisture to match all the water flowing in the apartment.
Unlike the usual sex and
sensationalism of the genre, the powerful subtext of New York real estate
creates quite another sense of horror in Dark
Water, suggesting the constant frustration of tenants dealing with the
people who control the leasing of apartments in the city. Dahlia must
constantly nag the incompetent, recalcitrant building superintendent and the
effusive, obsequious rental agent, who in the usual fashion tell her they will
help and then of course do nothing at all or invoke some elaborate and
plausible version of catch-22.
The movie buries another, mostly
implied rather than examined subject, the sense that nobody tells the truth.
The rental agent’s facile patter to smooth over the inadequacies of the
apartment initially marks him as a liar, along with his responses on the phone
about being busy in his office when he is eating lunch or patronizing the OTB.
Dahlia’s lawyer, the one good guy in the film, works out of his car and often
mentions the family he does not possess.
The pervasive dishonesty, the
constant rain, the smothering drabness, the dark lighting, the frustrations of
contemporary urban life ultimately create the greatest horror in Dark Water.
Dark Water(PG-13), starring
Jennifer Connelly, John C. Reilly, Tim Roth, Peter Postlethwaite; based on the
film by Hideo Nakata; directed by Walter Salles. Cinemark Tinseltown; Loews
Webster; Pittsford Plaza Cinema; Regal Culver Ridge, Eastview, Greece Ridge,
Henrietta
Watch the Dark Water trailer by clickinghere!
This article appears in Jul 13-19, 2005.
