I’ve long been an admirer of Jennifer Connelly’s work and have followed her career for some time, from the child role Labryinth to the one-dimensional sex role of Career Opportunities to her evolution into one of America’s premier actresses (Pollock, A Beautiful Mind, House of Sand and Fog, Requiem for a Dream). She’s a fantastic talent, with tremendous range that prevents her (to a degree) from being pigeonholed.
But her latest, Dark Water, is a senseless pile of dung. Not to slight the more-sensitive piles of dung out there, of course, but this one just isn’t terribly comprehensible. It’s schizophrenic – does it want to be a psychological thriller, a la Gaslight, or does it want to be a haunted-apartment thriller? Let me tell you, this movie couldn’t carry Gaslight’s water, pun strongly intended. It has twelve times the special effects but one hundreth the quality. There’s no real chills, nothing that’ll set your teeth on edge.
Dahlia Williams (Connelly) is newly separated from her husband and they’re bitterly fighting over their young daughter, Ceci. Dahlia moves into an old apartment building to start a new life, but she quickly runs into a couple of major problems: the giant leak in her apartment and the sudden appearance of an invisible friend for Ceci.
If you’ve seen Hide and Seek, or any movie in which an invisible friend appears (oh no, another pun), you know how adults react in these movies: They don’t believe the kid. Ceci insists her new friend Natasha is real, and yet there are no other children in the apartment building, according to building owner Mr. Murray (John C. Reilly). And so Ceci acts out in her new class, and the leak grows and grows..
Is Dahlia going crazy? Is her husband trying to drive her insane, so she’ll give up the custody battle? Some evidence points to him, and then it’s quickly dropped as a story thread. To buttress the case for Something Being Awry, we’re given a bit of Dahlia’s own history; apparently her mother was a neglectful drunk, and something about the rain and water and such, and you can see how Dahlia might go bonkers with water leaking in her tiny apartment.
I can forgive an awful lot in movies – you have to, really; it’s call suspension of disbelief – but when a movie trots out all kinds of possible explanations and never seems to settle on one, I’m not so forgiving. What should have been suspenseful was merely amusing; what should have startled me I saw coming. I think you will, too.
Dark Water: *1/2
