WALTER Salles’ haunted-apartment thriller “Dark Water” doesn’t sink like a stone, but for a movie with such a pedigreed director and a cast headed by Jennifer Connelly, it doesn’t exactly float much above mediocrity, either.
For all its classiness, restraint and the novelty of its setting – Roosevelt Island – “Dark Water” isn’t that much more satisfying than Hollywood’s previous iterations of female-driven, water-logged thrillers by Japanese horror maestro Hideo Nakata (“The Ring,” parts one and two).
It doesn’t help that in the space of three years, the novelty that made Nakata’s films into cult favorites has become wearying Hollywood cliché.
Salles, the hugely gifted Brazilian director of “Central Station” and “Motorcycle Diaries,” starts things out fairly promisingly in “Dark Water.”
Dahlia, played with great intensity by Connelly, is a recently divorced single mother who moves with her 6-year-old daughter, Ceci (Ariel Gade), to an apartment in a run-down building on Roosevelt Island, much to the annoyance of her ex-husband (Dougray Scott), who lives in Jersey City.
It rains throughout the film, and water is constantly dripping through the ceiling of their ninth-floor apartment.
The don’t-bother-me handyman (British actor Pete Postelwaite, Oscar nominated for “In the Sins of the Father,” here sporting a Transylvanian accent) insists it’s because kids have been turning on the taps in the abandoned apartment above.
But then why is the water turning dark even in the laundry room?
And, more ominously, why is young Ceci having conversations with an imaginary friend who may or may not be the little girl who lived in the apartment upstairs?
Oscar-winner Connelly gives a good account of a woman who has a harder and harder time distinguishing between reality and delusion.
But it doesn’t help that the film’s own grip on reality is so tenuous it has Dahlia paying $900 for a one-bedroom apartment in the city.
An even bigger problem is that most of the characters – John C. Reilly’s rental agent and Tim Roth’s shifty lawyer – exist for no other reason than to help drive Dahlia to distraction.
If you can check your brain at the popcorn stand and keep your expectations low, “Dark Water” is an OK genre exercise that maintains a consistently creepy tone – even if the head-scratching, bring-on-the-special-effects ending feels like a compromise reached after many test screenings.
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DARK WATER
[**] (Two stars)
Treading water. Running time: 104 minutes. Rated PG- 13 (disturbing images, references to child abuse and neglect). At the Loews State, the Chelsea West, the Union Square, others.