Like so many of the American remakes of Japanese horror movies from the early 2000’s, the turn around time between the original being put out and the remake was barely anything. As I mentioned in the previous review, I hadn’t even heard of the original movie when this was released but even this release didn’t seem to get any press or recognition. I had no idea that they managed to get John C. Reilly and Tim Roth to be in this until I looked it up and you’d think that would be in the trailers or promotional material somewhere. This remake feels like the studio fully didn’t believe in it even before it managed to come out and just made it because it was the trend at the time.

The plot of the remake remains almost identical to the original but changing things around for an American audience. Now the whole thing takes place in New York and Jennifer Connelly plays our single mother Dahlia moving into the shitty new apartment on Roosevelt Island with her daughter Cecelia. This time around we get a bit more information on the actual little ghost girl and what her family situation was like. There is also a bit more time given over to the background of Dahlia and the issues that she faced growing up. The broad strokes of the plot, however, stay the same with the same narrative points hit even if done in a different way.

Perhaps the largest difference going from the original to this version is that of emotional intensity. In the original Dark Water, everything was very understated and quiet and the feeling was more that of sadness than anything else. For the American audience, things get dialed up. The divorcing parents are yelling and sniping at each other, Dahlia angrily demands a fix to the ceiling rather than just demurely asking and then dealing with it for weeks, and even the ghost girl is more hands-on creepy than just a background figure in yellow. The mother’s backstory isn’t just that her parents divorced and she was picked up late sometimes, instead her father was abusive and her mother was an alcoholic that abandoned her. The ghost girl didn’t just go missing, instead her mother was also an alcoholic and left for rehab assuming the dad would take care of her but the dad assumed the mom took her and so left for Russia, leaving the girl abandoned. Everything dialed up.

This isn’t bad, though, because it does mean we get some more backstory and the pacing is a bit better. Both movies have about the same runtime but the American one manages to pack in a lot more story to it by sacrificing the long lingering moments from the original. In fact, the timeline of everything gets compacted in this movie. Instead of the girl being missing for years, she’s been gone for a month. Instead of the mom and kid being in the shitty apartment for months, they are there for barely a over a week. The ending time skip is 3 weeks instead of 10 years. While it is a complaint that American movies will often spell things out for audiences, I think this one giving the extra story does a lot to make the mother’s sacrifice in the end feel more realistic.

Maybe it’s the American in me or maybe it’s my deep and abiding love of Jennifer Connelly but I just think this is a slightly better telling of the story. Not enough to bump the rating, though.

Score: 3 out of 5