Well, I guess coming in out of the rain was a bust.

The DVD menu for Dark Water features a bathroom sink running … dark water. Looks like blood. Only through experience gained through years of practice did I manage to keep my eyes from rolling out of their sockets. But a few minutes into the movie and this promise of action to come — any action! — is the hope that keeps me alive. As Terry Pratchett has pointed out, give a man enough hope and he’ll hang himself.

Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly) is a poor, recently divorced mother on the thin edge of a custody dispute; Pete Postlethwaite (of Usual Suspects) is the creepy, unfriendly super; and young Ceci (Arial Gade) is the film’s Danny Torrence — a young child who catches on earlier than anyone else that there are monsters under the bed.

The movie plods for about forty minutes or so setting up a kind of Shining in the City vibe, dwelling on Dahlia’s economic hardship and interpersonal conflicts on Roosevelt Island and squicky visions of near-poverty-line living: broken elevators, sleazy landlords, hair clots coming out of the tap, and — of course — the slow drip of dark water in the bedroom ceiling.

It’s like the anti-New Zealand.

Setting up this atmosphere of dread, hopelessness, and threat is not really all that challenging — most serious horror films manage to do so quite handily. Doing so while keeping the viewer engaged is a bit more difficult. It helps to practice some some economy, a concept director Walter Salles seems to have failed to grasp. The first third of the movie is almost entirely given over to vignettes demonstrating how screwed up and tenuous Dahlia’s life is before the supernatural intervenes.

We see Dahlia’s desperation finding an apartment, Dahlia interviewing for a low-paying menial office job, Dahlia being suckered by the aforementioned landlord, and not one but two scenes with the divorce mediators before we start getting the first hints of what the actual horror story might be about. Have I mentioned the pill popping? Dahlia is on some prescription medication for migraines that makes her very, very sleepy. Maybe it makes her hallucinate. Ceci’s dad is suing for custody because he thinks Dahlia is a nutcase.

An architect really thought this was a good idea?

When the ghost manifests, it’s almost always in the form of puddles — made scary only thanks to Angelo Badalamenti’s score. So are the ghosts real, or is it Dahlia’s subconcious being brought to the fore through aggressive chemical treatment? So no real help there. If the first third of the film illustrates Dahlia’s interpersonal hardships before ghostie Natasha Rimsky makes her first moist appearance, the latter two-thirds of the movie are mostly about … Dahlia’s poverty, divorce, and battle to get the plumbing fixed.

Now, Stephen King has demonstrated over and over again how broken or breaking people make excellent protagonists for stories of the supernatural. But he uses that as characterization and subplot, and doesn’t slight the creepy. A big attraction of the good ghost stories (like The Ring) is learing what the hell caused the haunting in the first place. Walter Salles doesn’t seem to get this. Instead he treats Natasha as a spooky subtext. Natasha’s story is revealed all buy a lawyer doing his best last-five-minutes-of-Columbo impersonation.

In it’s place: drip after brown drip of prosaic, domestic misery illustrating the destructive power of divorce. Creepy though the movie is at moments, it’s made crystal clear that the ghost story itself is being treated as metaphor of Dahlia’s impending psychotic break. Whatever spooks may inhabit Walter Salles’ film, it seems as though it’s the idea of a horror film that Salles fears most.

Why not save this movie for a rainy day?