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DARK WATER

The best ghost stories work on an almost subconscious level. They sneak under your skin when you're least expecting them to, polluting your sense of comfort, distorting familiar settings, familiar scenes, everyday objects and events. The best ghost stories are not loud or vibrant. They're a kind of mood music that plays behind our day-to-day lives. They're frightening because they suggest that our safety is not assured in our homes, that our security - something we work so hard to ensure - is fragile and tenuous. It could all collapse in a moment, destroyed by something we cannot predict and cannot fight.

Yoshimi is struggling. She is newly divorced and trying to raise her young daughter Ikuko on her own. She is unemployed, unable to find a home for herself and daughter and under a considerable amount of stress due to the custody battle she is waging against Ikuko's father. She finally settles on a large apartment in an old, rundown apartment complex. Almost immediately, strange things begin to happen. A small, red bag keeps appearing around her apartment, Ikuko falls ill at school, footsteps can be heard from the vacant apartment above hers and, most disturbingly, a sickly, yellow water mark appears on the ceiling in her bedroom, dripping water almost constantly. And then there's the sudden, random, frequent sightings of a little girl in a yellow rain coat. A little girl whose description matches that of a young girl who had gone missing over two years ago.

Hideo Nakata's DARK WATER is one of the best of all ghost stories. It is simple, tragic and frightening. The world of the film and the characters whose lives we witness throughout feel genuine and real. Unlike Nakata's breakthrough film RINGU, there is nothing to separate us from the reality of the film, no cursed videotapes or dead people emerging from television sets. It remains grounded in uncomfortable reality even as it slips into the supernatural. While DARK WATER looks and feels like RINGU - inescapable really as both films were based off stories by Koji Suzuki and produced by much of the same crew - tonally the film is much closer to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's PULSE. Both PULSE and DARK WATER deal with fractured lives, crippled by loneliness and despair, trying desperately to find some semblance of happiness in a world that appears indifferent to their struggles.

But unlike both RINGU and PULSE, the narrative of DARK WATER is fairly bare boned. There are no extraneous subplots or characters and everything is told in a brisk, straight forward and honest fashion. The slim narrative on display here allows for Nakata to amp up the tension at a surprisingly brisk pace - it's within the first ten minutes that we first see the little girl in the yellow raincoat - while keeping the focus squarely on the mother / daughter relationship that forms the emotional core of the film. Aside from a needlessly tacked on coda that does little in the way of surprising the audience - or offering any sort of closure - this is as economical a horror film as you're ever likely to see. It gives us everything we need and nothing we don't and that allows us to simply enjoy the film without having to keep track of things we neither care about nor want in the way.

I mentioned a moment ago that DARK WATER is frightening. It's rare that I find a ghost story that frightens me as I do not believe in such things and that fact severs my emotional ties to the film before it can ever take hold. But DARK WATER frightened me several times and had me cringing through most of the film's short running time. That is a testament to everyone involved in the film, from the sharp, precise direction of Nakata, to the eerie, ambient scoring of Kenji Kawai, to the brilliant performances of Hitomi Kuroki and Rio Kanno. It's a wonderful film, full of disturbing images and genuine emotion and should be as acclaimed as any horror film to come out of Japan in the last 25 years. Simply brilliant.

Essential viewing.