Honogurai mizu no soko kara (2002)

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Yoshimi Matsubara	Hitomi Kuroki	½
Ikuko Matsubara (6 years old)	Rio Kanno
Mitsuko Kawai	Kirei Oguchi
Ikuko Hamada (16 years old)	Asami Mizukawa
Kunio Hamada	Fymiyo Kohinata
Ohta	Yu Tokui

Review

Japanese horror filmmaker Hideo Nakata's follow-up to his hugely successful Ring series came at the a time when The Ring was being remade in USA, which would only add to his already growing status. Both Ring and Dark Water are based on stories by Kôji Suzuki, and both discuss very similar subject matters. The difference, however, is that Dark Water has very little of Ring's suspense. It's a long-winded and overplayed film, filled with water and despair, but not many surprises. This makes for a stagnant film experience. Granted, the thematics could have been interesting, but Nakata fails to explore them beyond a very shallow level of lost red bags and simplified guilt. The final scene, an epilogue, is by far the film's most effective, but by then, any tension the film could have exploited is far gone. Remade in English in 2005 by Brazilian director Walter Salles (Central do Brasil, Diários de Motocicleta).