Hideo Nakata
Dark Water

After the success of "Ringu" and "Ringu II", and their subsequent Hollywood assimilation, the duo Nakata - Suzuki returns to work with a thriller that retains some key elements of the aforementioned films, namely screens haunted by ghostly young girls and family units with divorced mothers. However, this time, they introduce water as the vehicle for yet another curse that will grip mother and daughter. The two, upon moving into a facility on the Japanese outskirts, will notice a stain on the ceiling. This, along with occasional footsteps from the floor above, draws their attention to the possibility that the upstairs residence is haunted. This hypothesis becomes a certainty with the discovery of a handbag, originally belonging to a missing girl, which reappears on several occasions to serve as a precursor to strange events.
Unfortunately, besides neglecting the possibility of setting fire to said handbag, Yoshimi also frequently loses sight of her daughter, who is in delicate health...yet, in return, she encounters the ghost of the missing girl. The scene where Yoshimi, thinking her enfeebled daughter is the child she has gathered from the floor in the haunted apartment, walks down the corridor towards the elevator, and upon turning, sees her daughter emerging from the apartment's threshold, realizing she's holding something else in her hand, is worthy of applause...

On the technical aspect, director Hideo Nakata presents tones obscured by downpours of rain and those of yellow jasper in the flashbacks, alternating with the clear sky of the periphery. Night soon makes its appearance, ultimately sealing the film, with shots that transition from unstable to distorted as the malevolent flow floods the labyrinthine building, amidst distant echoes of piano, drums, and strings acting as referees to the separation between mother and daughter: a kidnapping that, ten years later, will lead the daughter back to the same place, towards yet another unpleasant surprise awaiting her, establishing loneliness as the only "moral" of the prolepsis and the film itself.