Hideo Nakata must have a fascination with girls and dirty water. He took the world by storm with 'Ring' which involved a creepy girl in a well, and now this. A single mother and her daughter move into a new apartment in order to try and win sole custody of her child. However, she starts experiencing unexplainable sounds and startling visions which questions her mental well-being. An interesting combination, and one that works effectively. Merging supernatural tension with a family's emotional struggle, the symbolism and metaphorical analogies of divorce is apparent. How it can destroy not just the people around you, but also belongings and ownership of possessions. One may consider the ghostly entity to be a reminder of the emotional distress you can go through during a divorce. Other perspectives may just include the fact that she moved into a dilapidated complex where her ceiling is leaking. That's right, two valuable lessons here. Firstly, if your ceiling is leaking...abandon your home and save yourselves. Secondly, if you are running late to pick up your child from school...God damn tell someone! Nonetheless, Nakata directed another chilling horror with many effective camera placements where ghostly imagery can be seen in the distance. Hitomi Kuroki beautifully acted the innocent mother, she held the film together. Really emotional scene towards the end where mother and daughter are separated by an elevator, I felt the feels. Whilst it is a horror, it's not particularly scary. It's more focussed on the family drama. The ghost's motives were extremely ambiguous. At certain points she becomes aggressive and malicious, but her unfortunate demise was her own doing. I'm not entirely convinced that she needed to be the antagonist, particularly during the third act. I can see why, it just felt rushed and spontaneous. Also the last ten minutes could've been cut to make a tighter film. Yet again, another good Japanese horror where the American remake pales in comparison.

Now that Japanese horror movies are in fashion, any third-rate flick like this one reaps all kinds of undeserved praise.Japanese don't make real movies but rather filmographed manga cartoons, with no effort to build up a logical plot. This was true for "The ring" and it stays true for this botched attempt at a movie. It is slow-moving, derivative and entirely devoid of any action. There are very little scares if at all. The plot is extremely predictable and has holes as big as skyscrapers. Perhaps this abortion may appeal to people interested in some tepid childhood drama, but even that is so half-hearted and lackadaisical that it adds very little interest.The only redeeming feature are the performances of the two main actresses. Only recommended to trendy viewers interested in getting all warm and fuzzy with the latest cinematic vogue.

This is the most depressing flick I have seen in my life. Also the one with the dumbest end twist. I wish someone has warned me beforehand, as they would have spared me 2 very sad hours. That's why this will be, rather than a review, a warning for the reader so what happened to me won't happen to him/her. Now, I would have never taken this one home if it wasn't for the fact that I have been watching some pretty good supernatural Asian flicks--The Eye, Ringu and so on--and I got carried away. But that stops there; no such luck here, this one is to miss, if you don't want to feel like shooting yourself after viewing it.This is rare flick in that it never gives you a break, never lets up. Thoroughly depressing, just as Irreversible is disgusting, and that from beginning to end. There is absolutely no light moments here, no pause to the horrible things happening to the protagonist, no comic relief, no ironic social comment; nothing of that breather, that distancing from reality, that you need so when watching a litany of sad events; that little something that will tell you that, after all, you are just watching a movie. See, this is about a poor young woman who's not only engaged in a bitter custody battle with the father of her 6 year old daughter but who at the same time has to find a new job and to get set in her new apartment--in a creepy old building, where water is pouring all over, without management giving a hoot about it. On top of that, she starts sensing some strange things going on there—frequent steps on the empty apartment above hers; mysterious, fleeting shapes, silhouettes walking on the roof—all that while her kid starts acting weird and having fainting spells at school. But her main problem is that she seems to be all by herself in the world, the only two people with whom she seems to relate in any way—besides the school personal and the Child Services--being her ex, who'll do anything to take her kid away from her, and some sort of white knight of a lawyer who appears as from thin air and who seems ready to sly dragons for her but who won't be there when she'll need him most. This point is driven by hedge hammer to us, from beginning to end, in case you missed it: the poor soul doesn't have any luck, she doesn't get any break; nobody in the world is there to lend her a hand; no parents, no brothers or sisters, no friends--all that in a society where, we're told, family & friends are so important. As for myself I venture that the main cause of all that is simply that she's stupid, as you'll see now.So, the film starts with her moving to that apartment in that old, rickety, building, which for all purposes looks already abandoned, as we won't ever see anybody but her in it, except for a couple of old folks in the lobby in just one occasion, so you'll be excused if you think she is actually living in an abandoned building. Now, why I'm saying she is stupid. For aprox. 90 min. the point is driven to us, also with a sledge hammer, that her kid is everything to her, that she just couldn't live without her. Naturally, we feel also her panic when she temporally loses her; we tremble with her when we realize the ghost--as there's a ghost in the building--is going after the daughter and we are horrified when it seems to have gotten her for good. Now, before going any further, the ghost is that of a girl of the same age who lived in the apartment above hers, who was abandoned by her own parents and who went once for some reason to climb to the top of the water tower, fell into it and drowned. All that without anybody ever noticing what had happened and giving from then on the girl as disappeared. Now, what occurs in the crucial scene I talked about is that this ghost girl appears physically to her, the woman, in the elevator, and grabs her and starts calling her "Mom", presumably taking her for her real mother, all that in front of the horrified eyes of her kid. And what does the woman do then? She waves her child good bye, she abandons her! having decided to become a ghost also and do babysitting for the deceased girl. All that after having babbled for about90 min. about how much she loves her kid! Didn't I say this is the dumbest end twist ever in a movie (and had this woman ever seen Ghost Whisperer?).In all, a depressing, inane, waste of time. One to ignore. 2/10.

Yoshimi Matsubara (Kuroki) is a newly divorced mother that moves into an old apartment with her six-year-old daughter Ikuko (Kanno) where creepy things begin happening, which include a strange little girl and a water leakage from the ceiling. Falls into many ghost story clichés, but director Hideo Nakata executes the development and scares wonderfully. The tension builds to a satisfying conclusion, but the conclusion story-wise is a bit of a disappointment; specifically the film's obvious theme of water that seems all unnecessary when the film finally ends. Most people will see it for the scares, and they will be most satisfied.*** (out of four)