Dark Water (2002 film)

Dark Water is a 2002 Japanese supernatural horror film directed by Hideo Nakata, with a screenplay by Yoshihiro Nakamura and Kenichi Suzuki. It adapts Koji Suzuki's 1996 short story "Floating Water." The story centers on a divorced mother, played by Hitomi Kuroki, who moves into a dilapidated apartment with her six-year-old daughter, portrayed by Rio Kanno. Strange events tied to a persistent water leak from the upstairs unit begin to plague them. The film earned positive reviews and brought in $1.4 million at the global box office.

The plot follows Yoshimi Matsubara, who is trying to piece her life together after a difficult divorce from Kunio Hamada, while fighting for sole custody of their daughter Ikuko. She rents a shabby apartment, enrolls Ikuko in a nearby kindergarten, and takes a job as a proofreader at a small publishing company. A water stain on the ceiling worsens over time, and her complaints to the building superintendent, Kamiya, go nowhere. Strange happenings soon follow: a child's red schoolbag keeps reappearing no matter how many times she throws it away, and she catches glimpses of a mysterious little girl. These events echo her own childhood trauma of being abandoned at kindergarten, shown in flashbacks. She struggles to pick up Ikuko on time and feels pressure when her ex-husband tries to take their daughter. Yoshimi eventually learns about Mitsuko Kawai, a girl who disappeared a year earlier, from a missing-person photo showing her in a yellow raincoat and red schoolbag. She discovers Mitsuko once lived in the vacant unit directly above her.

One day, Yoshimi finds Ikuko in that upstairs apartment, where the faucets have been left running and the place is flooded. Her lawyer pressures Kamiya into fixing the leak, and things seem to calm down—until the red schoolbag shows up again. Yoshimi goes to the roof and notices the water tank was last inspected over a year ago, around the time Mitsuko vanished. A vision reveals that Mitsuko fell into the tank while trying to retrieve her schoolbag and drowned. Meanwhile, Mitsuko's ghost tries to drown Ikuko in the bathtub. Yoshimi rushes back, grabs her unconscious daughter, and flees into the elevator. But as the doors close, she realizes the figure chasing her is actually Ikuko, and she has been carrying Mitsuko. A decayed Mitsuko clings to Yoshimi, who understands she won't let go.