DARK WATER

In the midst of a bitter divorce, Yoshimi and her daughter need a new place to live. She visits a large, run-down flat, but is persuaded by an insistent landlord to move in immediately. Yoshimi quickly realises that her flat is unfit to live in due to an abnormal level of humidity, and worse, it’s haunted by the ghost of a little girl who tries to separate her from her daughter.

In 1998, Ring, the iconic film about a mysterious video cassette with a curse on it, triggered a tidal wave of Japanese horror films, or J-Horror. Four years later, Hideo Nakata directed Dark Water, a masterpiece of this Japanese new wave and a film as much a poignant drama as it is a ghost story. If Ring plunges viewers into the deep waters of a murky well that hides a ghastly secret, Dark Water portrays a world where ghosts haunt the water-saturated daily life of a mother and her daughter. Water is their stomping grounds and the membrane that separates the world of the dead from that of the living. With an impressive soundtrack by Kinji Kawai (Ghost in the Shell, Ring) that enhances further the ambience of the film, Dark Water draws its power from Nakata’s deft combination of pure terror and melancholy.