Yet another American remake of a Japanese horror film, but not, please, "just another." This atmospheric ghost story is more coherent, more cohesive, more cogent, than any Ring, any Grudge, any at all. It has a palpable theme, motherhood, and an evocative visual motif, water, and these have been worked out meticulously and efficiently in the screenplay of Rafael Yglesias. And the action is firmly ensconced in a specific locale, Roosevelt Island, formerly Welfare Island, a tram ride from the bright lights of Manhattan, but a world apart, a world enclosed, with its ugly, utilitarian high-rise apartments "in the Brutalist Style," exuding all the warmth and charm of the postwar Communist Bloc. So firmly and so specific, in fact, that the film decisively cuts itself free from its source. There is here a kind of Barton Fink feeling, practically a feeling of Repulsion, in the sheer physical oppression (the persistent rain, the low-watt lights, the balky elevator, the stain on the ceiling, the drip of oil-black water, the clump of hair coughed out of the bathroom faucet); and the cinematography of Affonso Beato (an Almodóvar man, plus Ghost World, most notably) admits as little color as possible, preferably gloomy, gray, greeny, yellowy, sickly color. The film would be sufficiently horrific even without the ghost, though it would then be missing two or three delectable frissons. Jennifer Connelly -- pale, thin, fragile, a bit wraithlike herself, just the sort of person an actual ghost might choose to reach out to -- plays, with fierce intensity, the unidealized mother who is trying very hard to surpass the very low standard set by her own mother, and not having an easy time of it. Being haunted by a ghost, needless to say, will not make it any easier, but will make it profounder. With Ariel Gade, John C. Reilly, Pete Postlethwaite, Tim Roth, Dougray Scott; directed by Walter Salles. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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