Brazilian director Walter Salles is most famous for his lovely, touching Central Station and the excellent, rousing tale of Che Guevara’s youth, The Motorcycle Diaries. Both those movies show a concern with social issues on his native continent, and give rich, deep portrayals of their characters and their lives, so it’s a surprise to find him directing an American genre picture — Dark Water, a horror movie.
Perhaps Salles just wanted an opportunity to give his filmmaking skills a work-out, or he wanted to try something different, like his fellow Brazilian Fernando Meirelles going from City of God to the forthcoming John Le Carré adaptation, The Constant Gardener, or his Mexican colleague Alfonso Cuarón, moving from Y Tu Mamá También to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Maybe this is all a sign of Anglo-American cultural imperialism sucking up talent from outside its limited boundaries; or it’s a case of directors trying to alternate between personal and commercial projects.
Either way, Salles does well with Dark Water. It is not, it must be said, a conventional horror movie; it’s more of a psychological chiller. The horror is very internal. It’s the American version of a film by Japanese director Hideo Nakata, who has to be the reigning master of very quiet horror movies. It seems the United States is determined to translate all Nakata’s work, from The Ring on, into American, and for this one they hired Salles to do it.
Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly) and Kyle (Dougray Scott) are a recently divorced couple who are still in the stage of post-split bitterness and mutual obstruction. Dahlia needs to find somewhere new for herself and their little daughter, Ceci (Ariel Gade) to stay; and she hasn’t got lots of money to spend, either. Amid the conflict with dad, Dahlia finds a cheap apartment on New York’s Roosevelt Island — a real location in the middle of the river between Manhattan and Queens, once thought to be the ideal location for socially progressive housing. But the resultant massive, gloomy apartment blocks there already suggest a horror movie. They are, as John C Reilly as the estate agent chirpily notes, in the brutalist style.
The building, naturally, is central to the story: it is very much a character in its own right, and as important to the feel and success of the movie as Affonso Beato’s beautifully subdued, oblique camera work and Angelo Badalamenti’s spooky score. You want to scream “Don’t move in!” at Dahlia and Ceci, because of course you can see the haunted-house-type plot coming. As you succumb to the sense of inevitable disaster that Salles et al conjure so well, Dahlia and Ceci move in to that dank, water-stained apartment — and then all sorts of strange things start to happen.
But they happen slowly, unfolding from the place and the characters in a style that you could call slow-burn horror, except this is such a wet movie that you’d have to say, instead, that it’s more like drip-drip horror.
At a time when most horror movies seem to be gorefests, clichéfests or send-ups, a movie such as Dark Water shows that they can still be original and fresh. It’s credible on a human level (these are not just bodies to be carved up), it’s stunningly well made, and it draws the viewer relentlessly into its compelling mysteries.