Wet T-shirt Contest

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday October 21, 2005

Phillip McCarthy

Can Jennifer ConnElly out-act Naomi Watts in the watery horror stakes? Phillip McCarthy REPORTS.

DARK WATER

Director Walter Salles Stars Jennifer Connelly, Ariel Gade Rated M. Screening now.

Watch the trailer at smh.com.au/metro

Japanese horror films have a fixation with single protective mothers and water. At least the ones Hollywood remakes do. First there was Naomi Watts in all her perky blondeness in The Ring movies, where she faced a precocious son and the overcast weather of Seattle.

Now brooding beauty Jennifer Connelly plays a troubled divorcee with fairly tenuous custody of a daughter in Dark Water. Unremitting rain is the most pleasant of the H2O treatments here; it's not called Dark Water for nothing. There's the growing mouldy patch of her ceiling, a laundry room where the Whirlpools overflow with brackish water ... And let's not get into what comes out of the faucets in the apartment above her.

Connelly might think Watts is some sort of celluloid-in-law; they're the marquee names in a odd little film subgenre - terror teriyaki perhaps - where water runs thicker than blood.

Dark Water was co-written by Japanese horror impressario Hideo Nakata, who wrote and directed the Japanese version, wrote and directed two Japanese instalments of The Ring and directed Watts in the second Hollywood version.

Acclaimed Brazilian director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) took the helm for the English version of Dark Water. The rationale might have been that the combination of an

Oscar-winning leading lady and a classy Latin director might help expand its audience. That was, to a lesser extent, the way The Ring became an artistic and box-office success.

It didn't work out that way for Dark Water in the US. Critics who usually trash formulaic horror movies complained that Salles tried so hard to make Dark Water stylish he left out the required number of scares and screams. The comparisons with The Ring were as frequent as the appearance of ghostly little girls in both films.

"The Ring was spookier," says one critic. "But Connelly turns in the better performance as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown."

Connelly, who won her Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, might take solace in comments like that. She considered making Dark Water a form of water torture.

"I am a huge fan of personal hygiene, so I embrace water," Connelly says. "But I filmed so many scenes where my character was trapped in water or menaced by it that I might as have been doing Waterworld or Titanic.

"The producers were great. They tried so hard to make it bearable. They got a hot tub so I could sit around and be warm between without having to dry off the whole time. But there was a lot trudging around in cold, dank water."

Connelly's character Dahlia seems slightly unhinged throughout the film.

She is haunted by some nasty incidents in her childhood. Yet before our eyes she lets an ingratiating real estate agent (John C. Reilly) talk her into an apartment in a sliver of New York called Roosevelt Island.

Dahlia has some similarities with Kathy, the character Connelly played in House of Sand and Fog, and also with Marion the drug addict from Requiem for a Dream. Kathy, too, had just come

out of a failed marriage and her story also revolved around real estate.

"I was drawn to them both for similar reasons," Connelly says. "They're both complicated characters who are struggling with their lives. People say

that Marion, the girl I played in Requiem for a Dream, was pretty dark, too, so I guess I should be careful. I tend to get offered a lot of drug-addict parts, women on the verge, so I think I'm going to do a comedy next time."

© 2005 Sydney Morning Herald

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