I finally managed to get hold of an English-subtitled copy of this movie. I really enjoyed it, but there are a few things which confused me, namely, the ending:
Ikuko must eventually end up living with her father, but why does she seem to have almost no memory of what happened with her mother? And why is the apartment still full of all her stuff 10 years later? What exactly happened to her mother and Mitsuko?
I’d be really interested in hearing other people’s opinions on this movie. I watched it because Sublight, I believe, recommended it, and I love Japanese horror movies.
Here’s what I was thinking: Mitsuko drowned in the reservoir tank because her own mother was not watching her. She came back to warn Ikuko’s mother to watch her daughter more closely. But she was also lonely. (I know that in many cultures, the spirits of the drowned are said to be lonely, and will attempt to drown the living so they can have company.) Perhaps she was looking for a playmate by trying to drown Ikuko? Or looking for a new mother by trying to kill Ikuko so she could have access to her mother? At the end of the film, Ikuko says her mother was ‘protecting her’. Did her mother sacrifice herself to Mitsuko’s ghost so she would not take Ikuko? This is what I think, but I could be wrong, of course.
When Ikuko returns to the apartment 10 years later and sees her mother again, her mother must be a ghost, because she has not aged, and she disappears mysteriously. So maybe the whole apartment was also an illusion- the scene felt very dream-like, especially inthe way Ikuko reacted with the minimum of surprise to learn her mother was still ‘alive’.
I’m also not quite sure about the character of Mitsuko. Is she really evil? Or just lonely? Maybe she feels she died wrongly because no one was taking care of her.
I really enjoyed this movie. I think it was better than ‘Ringu’ in a lot of ways. The story and the characters were far more developed. I cared more about Yoshima than I did about any of the characters in ‘Ringu’, and the scene near the end in the elevator was both disturbing and emotional.
Anyway, let me answer the simplest questions first. All Itsuko’s stuff was in the apartment at the end, because it was an illusion her mom created for her. If you look very carefully at the edges of the screen when she first enters the apartment (and possibly again when she leaves), it’s as run-down and dirty as the rest of the complex.
As to why she doesn’t remember what happened, I think it’s a combination of mental blocks, being seemingly entranced for half of it (when she went up to the upstairs apartment, for instance, and seemed kind of sleepy/trancey during that last brilliant scene when she came out of the apartment), and the sheer unreality of the whole thing.
Mitsuko is a little harder to pin down. She’s not really hostile until the very end, so I’m not sure what her motivations were. (Initally, I thought she was giving the bag to Itsuko, but it may have been bait instead.) Ultimately, I think what she wanted was company/a mother. Otherwise, I don’t see why she would have been appeased by the mother’s “adoption” of her.
Overall, I enjoyed this movie a lot more than I did Ringu. I have to say that the guy who made these two films gave me my two favorite scary/horror movie moments: DW’s elevator scene (the one at the end), and Ringu’s television scene.
After seeing it, “Ringu” and “Uzumaki”, I thought “Dark Water” was the scariest of than them all.
I reached pretty much the same conclusions you did. At first I wasn’t sure if Mitsuko was evil, but I think in the end I decided she was, because she went about her haunting in such a creepy way. In my head, malevolent ghosts = creepy or deliberate, harmless ghosts = clumsy or subtle.
Perhaps Mitsuko wanted the mother all along. Wasn’t the drippy ceiling in the mother’s room? Didn’t the mother see the ghost the vast majority of the time? From what I remember Ikuko didn’t see the ghost at all until the bathroom scene. Maybe Mitsuko wanted Ikuko’s mother, and worked the entire movie at wearing her down so that in the end she’d make the decision she did. Perhaps Mitsuko made Ikuko forget what happened, as a sort of favor or gift. She knew her father would become her caretaker, so she would be taken care of, but she also didn’t want her hurt or traumatized. So she made her not remember what happened that night.
Or something. It’s been a few months since I saw it, and I’ve seen a lot of movies in the meantime.
I haven’t seen it yet, so I don’t think I was the one who recommended it. It looks pretty good, though, so I’ll check it out as soon as I get a chance.
Just an aside, but Dark Water (or Honogurai mizu no soko kara) was written by Koji Suzuki, the author of the Ringu novels. Guy’s got talent.