In my ongoing effort to improve my cineliteracy by catching up on or revisiting important or significant horror films, it occurred to me that I could stand to spend more time poking around Japanese horror, specifically Japanese horror from the late 90s and early 2000s, This was when films like Ringu and Ju-On and Audition were grabbing people’s notice outside of Japan as part of a wave of what ended up getting referred to as “J-horror.” It’s easy to forget now that creepy, long-haired girl ghosts are firmly cemented as part of horror film cliche, that there’s a cultural context for that imagery, and that some of those original films were scary as fuck in their own right. It was also this attention to Japanese horror film that piqued my interest in what horror films looked like outside of the U.S. (where most of what was getting made was boring) and contributed to me starting to write this thing. So I have those films in part to thank for my hobby.
But back to the cultural context bit. Horror is often rooted in culture, in specific cultural anxieties and symbology. The word mizuko, in Japanese, refers to a baby who dies before or during birth, and originally meant any dead baby. It translates literally as "child of the waters,” and this was very much on my mind as I was watching Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara (Dark Water), a spooky, atmospheric film about the trauma of parental neglect and the sacrifices parents make to keep their children safe.
We open on a shot of a little girl sitting inside, staring out into the rain. She’s at school, and it’s clear that all the other children have gone, long since picked up by their parents. She’s still there, waiting for a mother or father who hasn’t come yet. Cut to that same girl, now a grown woman, sitting inside, staring out into the rain. She’s Yoshimi Matsubara, and she’s in the middle of a nasty divorce and custody battle for her daughter, Ikuko. Her soon-to-be-ex-husband is, as is too often the case, playing dirty, bringing up the psychiatric help she received years before as evidence that she’s an unfit mother. But her attorney is confident that she’ll get custody. Ikuko is very young, just about to turn six, and that favors the mother.
But Yoshimi still has a lot of work ahead - she needs to find employment and a place for her and Ikuko to live, which is tough. She gets word of what sounds like a really good deal - a spacious apartment, more than enough for her and her daughter, going practically for a song. The agent seems really, really eager to close the deal and doesn’t seem to be getting too many takers. The building’s old, kind of run-down, but the price is right and it looks like it’ll be easy enough for her to get it. And soon enough, she and Ikuko are moving in.
And it isn’t too long after that Yoshimi starts to notice the water stain on the ceiling. The one coming from an unoccupied apartment upstairs.
Water’s there in the title, and water is all over this film. Much of the first act takes place, both in flashback and the present day, in torrential rain, and even sunny days are often the ones that immediately follow the storm, sunlight reflecting from the puddles that are everywhere. There are dream sequences, shot with Dutch angles, through an almost amber cast that makes everything look waterlogged. It also serves as a consistent visual shorthand for a presence that begins menacing the protagonists - water stains on the ceiling that spread like bruises, water spilling out from places it shouldn't. It works well because water's largely innocuous, yes, but it's also patient, implacable. Given enough time, water rusts through metal, even wears away stone. It’s common, even essential to life, but also potentially overwhelming, maybe even sinister. So the film creates a visual vocabulary early on and uses it consistently, using little things as a sign that something is wrong - apart from the water, there's a red school bag and a yellow raincoat that keep cropping up, and the pops of color they bring to a film whose cinematography otherwise largely leans toward the drab, help these signs to stand out without being obtrusive. This allows a lot of things to happen in the background without being too showy and signal danger without feeling contrived.
If you set a mood early and use imagery in systematic ways to tell the story, creating context, you can do a lot with a little, and this film does. The characters are all pretty well sketched-in using small moments and details that tell us much of what we need to know without just spelling it out for us. Yoshimi is doing the best she can and genuinely loves Ikuko, and Ikuko loves her back, but she’s afraid of being the absent mother she had, she doesn’t want to repeat that and hurt Ikuko the way she was hurt as a child. But it’s hard making a go of it on your own and demonstrating your self-sufficiency. There are people who want to help her - refreshingly, her own attorney doesn’t seem to be a weasel and doesn’t appear to have any ulterior motives, and she lands the job she needs despite having to bail on the interview early so Ikuko wouldn’t go through what she did as a child. Her ex-husband seems like a selfish, vindictive asshole, but not cartoonishly so, and again, it’s accomplished through small gestures and inferences. There are some moments that land maybe a little too obviously, mostly in the re-presentation of information we got earlier, in sort of a “remember this?” way, but it’s not distracting. It’s a film confident enough in its characterization that it trusts we’ll be able to keep up.
It's also paced quite well - it doesn't rush, and it's closer to two hours than not, but it doesn't really drag. It establishes who the players are economically, creates an increasingly untenable situation on a couple of fronts, and lets the process of discovery play out naturally. This means that when the climax comes - late, halfway through the third act, it's a sharp escalation, but not one that feels unearned or out of place, and it stays grounded enough in the vocabulary employed by the rest of the film that the "oh, shit" moments land really well. It’s a film that relies on mystery without actually being a mystery, if that makes sense - it presents a lot of things that seem odd or out of place without being over the top, so at first it’s not quite clear what everything means, but as it goes on it gradually puts the pieces together so that by the halfway point in the film you have a pretty good idea what’s going on, and the rest is just letting it spool out in a way where we can see the danger coming but know there’s nothing to do about it.
On top of being a well-crafted ghost story, there's also a strong backbeat to this film about parental abandonment, and the costs of parenting. It starts right away with our introduction first to young Yoshimi and then grown Yoshimi in matching shots. She's still that sad little girl in some ways, and it's clear that she doesn't want to be that kind of mother to Ikuko, doesn't want to pass that trauma on. Not all children are as lucky, and that's a big part of the film as well, and without getting spoilery is absolutely central to the horror of this film. The idea of the mizuko is an important one here. The damage done to children by neglect sometimes lingers, having effects long afterward. And at the intersection of these two things we have the sacrifices that parents make for their children, the ones they know the child can't understand and must to some degree be protected from. This strongly informs the climax of the film and a coda to the end that is equally touching and unnerving. It isn't blatant, there's no neon sign over it, it's just woven throughout the film, as embedded in the narrative as water is.
My problems with this film are largely minor - there are some unnecessary music stings, especially noticeable in a film that is otherwise largely fairly understated, and some of the effects are a little dated at this point, though not nearly enough to ruin anything. My biggest gripe is probably with the custody battle subplot. It's not overplayed in and of itself, but it presses the "Yoshimi starts acting crazy because of the supernatural goings-on and she's going to lose her kid because of it" button really hard, and I think this film would have worked just as well in the aftermath of a divorce, rather than during it. Yoshimi goes from zero to hysterical in a pretty cliched fashion, and it doesn't help the story all that much. It's just her and Ikuko, and I think that's enough to carry it, and that's where it does its best work anyway. But I don't think any of it ruins the film. It's a thoughtful, substantive ghost story that manages to be eerie, tense, and moving by turns, and I'm here for that.
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