Dark Water: Critic Reviews

Salles realizes the rotten dank desperation of her life so vividly that he has made, in effect, the first collapse-of-the- middle-class horror movie.

A dull and occasionally risible remake of an even duller, more risible Japanese horror flick ...

Dark Water has more substance and a more interesting look than many horror films, but the familiar elements of the story disappoint.

A tasteful but unremitting bummer and yet one more case of an Oscar-winning actress proving that she can still do the kinds of disposable movies big awards are supposedly meant to banish from your resume forever.

There's something that never quite works about the film, which can't seem to decide if it's all in Dahlia's head, all in the spirit world or all in her pipes.

Until it sputters to a nonsensical close, the film is a spooky entertainment.

It fails to deliver the narrative thrill twists its origins would promise.

Seductively spooky.

Salles seems too uncomfortable with the fantastic to get full value from the creeps and jumps his camerawork delivers.

Dark Water will leave some viewers scratching their heads, while others will be wide-eyed with appreciation. This viewer, at least, is reasonably wide-eyed.

The film's greatest mystery turns out to be: Why, with so much talent, does Dark Water never cross the tipping point?

Dark Water achieves some, but not all, of what we might hope for.

Director Walter Salles give this shocker an added psychological/ dramatic level that heightens the shivers.

While his movie lacks the psychological resonance of Rosemary's Baby or The Sixth Sense, it easily equals their creep-out quotient.

Dark Water is a lesson in how to transform atmospheric J-horror into soggy B filmmaking.

Dark Water is a murky business indeed, painfully sloooow, absurdly derivative and just plain embarrassing for the wealth of talented people involved in it.

Some may consider Dark Water too leisurely paced, but it's refreshing to see a film that doesn't shoo the ghost from a closet in the first half hour.

[Dark Water] is dripping with clammy, claustrophobic atmosphere, but ultimately reveals itself as just another mildewed, child-centric ghost story of little import or resonance.

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.

It's so lacking in heartfelt frights or cheap scares that the few real hair-raising moments, in the finale, don't pay off.

Working from a premise that's not only thin but transparent, Salles struggles mightily to generate tension in any other way possible.

[Salles] has managed to create a movie that's pretty bleak for a Hollywood -- especially Disney -- thriller.

Like so many recent thrillers of this ilk, many of them in some way exploiting the 'innocence' of childhood -- the dumb and unpleasant Hide and Seek springs to mind -- Dark Water falls apart in the wind-down.

This is an eerie, relentlessly grim, invasive little movie -- a tone poem of despair that seeps into you like the damp.

Dark Water has plenty of creepy moments, but few scares, and it becomes bogged down in setup.