Poor Jennifer Connelly.

Or rather, poor Jennifer Connelly’s domicile dillemas.

If she’s not relapsed into alcoholism, put her foot through a nail and contributed to an Iranian family's tragic demise after being forced from her home in The House of Sand and Fog, she’s a lonely single mother stuck in an apartment as skeazy as one those heroin-addled crash pads she suffered in Requiem for a Dream. This is her character’s lot in Dark Water, a film that at times makes you wish she’d get over the bitterness of her ex-husband’s philandering and just settle down with a nice plumber. But Connelly’s cinematic pain is her hallmark and she does vulnerability so well that just watching her liltingly beautiful anguish is enough to keep a film interesting. The duality of inherent niceness and tainted mystery has become increasingly fascinating a she gets older (she was never this interesting when younger) and she seems tremulously wiser but nearly inexplicable. Lovely—but what the hell is wrong with her? Connelly is another fractured heroine in Water, (a remake of film from the J-Horror director, Hideo Nakato, who also made Ringu) a movie more engaging in showing, with hyperbolic grime, the dashed dreams of the hip NY upper middle class family.

Stinging from custody battles with her husband, the oh-so-goth named Dahlia (Connelly) moves into a disgustingly filthy and depressingly dank apartment on Roosevelt Island with her darling daughter, Ceci (Ariel Gade) in tow. Why she would consider a place where the ceiling’s about to cave from water leakage is just one of the films stretched conceits but there is an explanation—a good school for Ceci is nearby and, well, Dahlia doesn’t have much money. There also exists a morbid pull for her--a simultanous repulsion/attraction towards a place crackheads might avoid. This would have played brilliantly in a film by Roman Polanksi but sadly, Dark Water can't near that kind of cooped-up genius.

Directed by Walter Salles (he of the acclaimed Motorcycle Diares and Central Station) and co-starring John C. Reilly and Tim Roth in poignantly funny shaggy dog roles, the picture begins with much promise. We’re actually absorbed by Connelly’s situation with her husband and amused by the atrocious living conditions of the apartment. But when things turned haunted (creepy imaginary friend for Ceci, Dahlia’s flashbacks of her terrible mother and loads and loads of black, icky water), the story loses steam. Worse, it’s never ever scary.

But there is subtext lingering underneath all the chills and crud— enough that you can feel the potentially smart dissection of divorce, single motherhood and madness straining to deepen. Unfortunately, confined by the supposed thrills and chills of pseudo-J-horror, the film's allegorical depth remains, unlike all the ooze saturating Connelly’s digs, helplessly clogged.

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