Dark Water

DARK WATER

Divorcee and daughter move into a creepy apartment building where strange events start to occur, and when the mom finds information about a missing girl that use to live upstairs, strange things start to happen. Director Hideo Nakata used a variety of techniques in his production design to portray specific themes in this film, Dark Water (2002). The overriding theme that was portrayed in Dark Water is that the past will come back to haunt you until you resolve it.

Nakata's use of color, as a part of production design, played a large part in conveying specific moods and feelings to the viewer. Red, blue, and yellow were the main colors I saw throughout the film. With red came fear and the unexpected. Throughout the film, Yoshimi Matsubara, the mother, had a taunting experience with a mysterious red bag that kept showing up after being repeatedly thrown away. Also, in the lobby, when the mom could not find her daughter, there were two red lights in the shot. This cast a red tint on the scene illustrated even more the fear that the mom was feeling at the sense of not being able to find her child. Yellow represented mystery and the unknown. The ghost of this little girl that had been missing for a couple of years was dressed in a yellow rain coat throughout the whole film, thus portraying a sense that she can't escape this sense of being lost. Blue represented innocence and curiosity. The daughter was always dressed in some form of blue, whether is be her blue coat, her blue umbrella, her blue boots, or her blue dress. This conveyed her innocence and her willingness to accept situations that most others wouldn't, like the ghost that was playing with her upstairs in the room full of water. Also, there were a few scenes that had a blue tint to them when the little girl was present, portraying that she is curious about the world around her. This use of color not only played a key role in the production design, but helped portray the theme of the past will always come back to haunt you if you don't resolve it. The yellow could represent the mother's past. The ghost dressed in yellow is haunting her throughout the film and at the end, Yoshimi becomes this ghost's mother. Yoshimi does this because she knows what its like to have a mother that was not there for her, thus giving closure to her own past.

The choice of props was key in this film as well. Dark Water didn't have a lot of special effects come into play, but the use of basic props built up the suspense just enough that allowed our minds to take care of the rest. One prop in the beginning of the movie that had such a big impact was the black clump of hair that came from the drain. Just from that you know something bad is going to happen. Other basic props such as the scattering footsteps coming from the room upstairs, the water bubbling in the bath tub, the murky water coming from the faucet, the cigarette mark on the elevator button made a big impact as well.