Tapping into terror

If you enjoyed Ring - the Japanese original, not the occult thriller's crass, nonsensical Americanised remake - then Dark Water, from the same duo (writer Koji Suzuki, director Hideo Nakata), should provide a follow-up frisson. It is more spartan - virtually a two-hander ghost story about a mother and child,
but with a similar concentration of slowly engaging terror.

To a dark and musty apartment house, with a single lift like an upended coffin, a concierge who sometimes looks more like a corpse, and a cold, grey-green interior, comes a young Japanese divorcee (Hitomi Kuroki) with the five-year-old child (Rio Kanno) for whose custody she is fighting her coldly unco-operative husband.

A small water stain on the child's bedroom ceiling seems at first of small consequence; but over the weeks, it grows to hideous dimensions, and gradually the mother senses some connection with a child's disappearance that occurred before the couple moved in.

Suspense builds, helped by the hermetic mood, the tonal bareness of setting, the mother's timidity, and small scenes generating unfocused unease.

Gradually, the water stain assumes a sinister, then threatening character until it gushes out of the taps, with hideous revelations, in one of those movie climaxes that have made the bathroom the most terrifying part of everyone's home.

Dark Water depends on your suspending disbelief about the ability of those deceased to reach out and possess the living - which is easy - and also (rather more difficult) to ignore the bad plumbing that Japanese estate agents are able to palm off on clients.

Its cleverness relies on transferring our concern from the supernatural events emanating from one lost child to the natural fear of a mother losing her own child to the other world.

Dark Water
Cert: cert15