directed by Walter Salles
screenplay by Rafael Yglesias
after the film Honogurai mizu no soko kara (Hideo Nakata, 2002)
screenplay by Hideo Nakata and Takashige Ichise
after a story from the book by Kôji Suzuki (1996)

It had the potential to be good, but it made so many tiny bad decisions, which cumulatively sabotaged the movie. I’ve seen the original movie, and I’m not saying it was a masterpiece, but it worked, and this remake could easily have followed the plan and worked equally well. It followed the plan in almost every respect, but then it changed little crucial things. And they were almost all mistakes.

Both versions are a really basic, bare-bones sort of ghost story, and in stories like this, it’s the details, the specifics of the build-up that matter. The first bit of ghostiness in the original is here made subtle to the point of being almost a non-event, just a moment of slight cinematic pressure, but no “evidence.” As soon as I saw that, I knew something was going wrong. The remake keeps this sort of thing up for most of the movie, smoothing over most of the surprises and clues and playing the “maybe it’s just psychological” card as steadily as it can.

I think their intention was to hold off the scary stuff in order to create more interest in the characters, and it actually may have worked on me, to some degree. Or maybe it was just Jennifer Connelly’s conscientious performance. In any case, I bought that this woman was a damaged young mother trying hard to stay on top of things, whereas in the original, the relationship between the woman’s childhood traumas and her current struggles was certainly indicated but I didn’t really feel it.

A lot of horror stories have that sort of after-the-fact easy psychology thrown on them, in the Stephen King manner – like, “the person who gets tormented by the spider aliens IS ALSO TORMENTED BY SELF-DOUBT, which adds depth to my schlock!” but what I can say for the original is that I believed that in this case, the filmmakers sincerely thought the relationship of the issue (neglected daughters) to the ghost (a neglected daughter) was important.

Odd, then, that the remake-makers somehow felt that the balance of the movie needed to be tilted even further in favor of non-ghost stuff. This source material had already found a good balance, I thought. By skewing the movie away from anything supernatural, the remake manages to make the ending seem like an embarrassing misstep, whereas if they hadn’t been so embarrassed to be making a horror movie in the first place, they could have prepared it properly, which ought to have been the whole point. Of course, they also screwed themselves by changing the ending.

The story ends with the ghost having its way, which is an unsettling place to end. The original believed in this ending and built the movie around it – it actually tied in to the “cycle of neglect” theme, in its way. The remake seems to feel obliged to stay true to the plot point but in every way possible waters it down – I know – so that it is as little unsettling as possible, and thus arbitrary and stupid. An epilogue that in the original drives home the compromised, creepy nature of the resolution is here reworked to be mere having-it-both-ways comfort, irritating and unnecessary. More important to a scaredy-cat like me, the one image of supernatural ickiness in the original has been wiped clean. To me, this has a huge impact on an entire movie – a movie that threatens to show you something icky and then finally makes good on the threat somehow actualizes all the earlier suspense, whereas a movie that holds that threat over your head and never lets it fall, not even a little, is just a scam. I’m not into gore in the least, but just one image that can correspond to the true heart of the threat in a movie has a certain talismanic power, at least for me, and this movie managed to put something totally benign in that position and show it to you several times over, thus killing the sense of portent that is so crucial to a slow-burn ghost story. This was a no-burn ghost story; nothing was even properly held over our heads as a threat for more than a scene – the remnants of that sort of suspense were here by pure inheritance from the original, but neither the screenwriter nor the director knew what function they were meant to serve.

Basically, this is a ghost movie made by people who apparently don’t like ghost movies, so they mumbled it, like someone embarrassed to say a word they don’t know how to pronounce. Such a shame, since the mumbling had good production design and a nice cast.

Though I do want to point out that John C. Reilly’s schtick was the same stuff he was doing in Magnolia, but was here really wrong and unamusing. A lot of reviews seem to have found him a fun presence, but he just seemed to me like someone half-assing it through a skit, getting cheap laughs out of not actually seeming like a real building manager. Tim Roth, on the other hand, did a very nice job with a pointless part.

When I saw that the music was going to be by Angelo Badalamenti, I thought that seemed like an excellent choice based on some of the creepy stuff he’s done for David Lynch, but the score turned out to be very mainstream and unimaginative, which I have to assume was the director’s choice. I think that even with this awkwardly adapted script, something more could have been salvaged, here, if the music had been committed to the idea that something moody and even a little dreamy was happening here, something uncanny that couldn’t be stopped. No such luck.

The 2002 Japanese movie upon which this was based, Honogurai mizu no soko kara, was translated/subtitled as Dark Water. The literal translation is apparently more like From the Depths of Murky Waters. This comes from the title of a 1996 collection of short stories by Kôji Suzuki. However, the movie is actually an adaptation only of the first story in that book, titled “Fuyuu Suru Mizu,” which in 2004 was translated into English, apparently accurately, as “Floating Water.” Not sure what “Floating Water” even means, but there you have it. This all took a bit of hunting so I thought I’d do you all the favor.