Page 101 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

88 Nightmare Japan

repressed woman must forever be acknowledged, their silenced voices
perpetually recognised if never fully understood. What these women
should never be, Nakata’s film suggests, is forgotten or ignored. Such
willful negation takes place at one’s own risk.
Likewise, to allay the sodden, restless spirit at the heart of Dark
Water, Yoshimi, the film’s heroine, endeavors to sever a cycle of
perceived abandonment and neglect by exchanging her living daughter,
Ikuko, for the ghost of a dead child, Mitsuko. This substitution transpires
during the film’s torrential climax, in which the deteriorating block-style
apartment building in which Yoshimi and Ikuko reside floods as if
drowning in the bitter tears of countless lamentations. This deluge packs
an emotional charge that is at first terrifying, then heart-breaking. In one
particularly effective sequence, Yoshimi, endeavoring to flee her
supernaturally drenched environs, grabs her daughter’s arm and splashes
her way down the darkened, leaking hallway. She enters the building’s
cantankerous lift, and frantically mashes the button for the building’s
lobby. With an incredibly assured command of visual (mis)direction,
Nakata orchestrates the film’s mise-en-scène so that it alternates between
varying close-ups of Yoshimi’s panicked face, POV shots that allow
viewers to glimpse through the lift’s thin rectangular window as the
mechanism ominously rises rather than descends, and extreme close-ups
of Yoshimi’s finger jabbing frantically at the lift’s array of numbered
buttons. As the lift reaches the floor directly above Yoshimi and Ikuko’s
apartment, a POV shot reveals a darkened, water-logged hallway. The
shot recalls a moment from earlier in the film, during which Yoshimi
catches a fleeting glimpse of Mitsuko’s spectral form seemingly walking
out the door of the apartment in which, we discover, she once lived with
her father. Approximating Yoshimi’s POV, this shot likewise reveals the
shadowy image of a young girl walking out into the hallway. The child-
sized figure turns and, calling for her mother, races towards the lift as it
jerks to a stop and it’s doors slide open. The child, Yoshimi soon realizes,
is Ikuko. Next, in perhaps Dark Water’s most chilling moment, Nakata
cuts to a medium shot of Yoshimi and then slowly dollies in to a close-up
of her face as she turns her head to see who, or what, is in the lift with
her. A reverse shot reveals her companion to be Mitsuko’s long drowned