[Click here for a reminder of the concept behind the "Capsule Reviews" series.]

Dark Water (Walter Salles, 2005): An unlikely follow-up to his 2004 breakout The Motorcycle Diaries, this atmospheric chiller is Walter Salles’s first English-language feature, as well as a remake of a 2002 film from Japanese horror specialist Hideo Nakata. Rafael Yglesias’s screenplay begins with a brief snapshot of 1974 Seattle, where a young girl is stranded outside her school, waiting for her tardy mother to pick her up. The film then flash-forwards to 2005 New York City, where the girl, Dahlia (a sublimely razzled Jennifer Connelly), is now in the midst of divorce proceedings. Her bitter ex-husband, Kyle (Dougray Scott), has purchased a Jersey City apartment, and would like Dahlia to do the same, so as to make the custody-sharing of Cecilia (Ariel Gade), their daughter, as efficient as possible. Dahlia doesn’t comply, and instead purchases a shoddy Roosevelt Island residence that stinks of decrepit mildew, leaky ceilings, and faulty faucets. (John C. Reilly is priceless in his brief role as the tacky apartment manager, while Pete Postlethwaite leaves a grumpy impression as the building’s superintendent.) The film is held back a bit by its one-note thematic interest: Yglesias’s script hardly even attempts an idea other than the dangers of thoughtless parenting, and, as such, the film grinds to something of a halt when a dramatic payoff is required. But Salles’s rain-soaked handling of the setting is strong and alive, and the film’s less a horror-genre exercise than it is a psychological portrayal punctuated by little mini-scares: a malfunctioning elevator that moves at suspiciously random intervals, a sink that sputters out strands of hair, and a Hello Kitty backpack that appears ripe with evil implications. In another film, Connelly’s Dahlia and Tim Roth’s Jeff Platzer — a trustworthy lawyer who appears in the film’s second half — would’ve made a splendid couple. [Tentative Rating: ***]

Read the rest of this entry »