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Dark Water Director: Hideo Nakata Number of Items: 1 Format: Color, Dolby Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested) Running Time: 100 minutes Studio: A.D. Vision Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2005-06-21 Buy from Amazon

Customer Reviews: Total numer of reviews: 31 Average rating: 4.0 "Scary" This begins as a slow-paced and understated drama. A young woman (Yoshimi Matsubara) is newly embroiled in an ugly divorce and moving with her six-year old daughter (Ikuko), the focus of a nasty custody fight, into a rather cheap and nasty block of flats which is all her budget allows. She takes a not very satisfactory job and introduces her daughter to the rather insalubrious local kindergarten. Meanwhile strange moments of creepiness start to crop up. A child's red handbag appears in odd places. A strange small figure is seen running through a doorway. And there seems to be water leaking through the ceiling. All is not quite right in this new home. As the drama develops these strange moments of creepiness get more sustained and, as it becomes slowly apparent that we are watching a quite astonishingly realized ghost story, they develop into some of the scariest sequences you are ever likely to see. Look out for (not that you are likely to miss it) the scene in the kindergarten when I is playing hide and seek and, come her turn to hide, something strange and watery comes looking for her... Best of all is the climactic scene, where, Yoshimi having more or less figured out the mystery, the suspense becomes almost unbearably intense. The scene reaches its climax in a moment of horrified realization that is one of the cleverest and most frightening moments in any horror movie. I'm getting a little old and jaded and there are not many films that get me back to those delicious hide-behind-the-sofa moments of childhood. But this did. Mr Nakata is of course the guy who made the extraordinary 'Ring' (or 'Ringu' as its American distributor insists on calling it) so it might have been a bit worrying for him that people would come to this with very high expectations. If so, he need not have worried: this delivers. In spite of the huge success of 'Ring' which must have put him in a position to command a respectable special effects budget, there's little evidence that he has bothered, making do as he does with astonishing camerawork, brilliant direction, first rate acting and a perfectly realized imaginative vision. Don't spoil the experience of seeing this wonderfully creepy movie by letting yourself see the soon to be released, tediously inevitable Hollywood remake first.