Dark Waters (1993)

Director: Mariano Baino

Screenplay: Mariano Baino and Andrew M. Bark

Cast: Louise Salter as Elizabeth, Venera Simmons as Sarah, Maria Kapnist as Mother Superior

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A British-Italian co-production shot between Ukraine and Russia, predominantly in Ukrainian locations, this does follow on from many Italian genre films by the end of the golden era of Italian genre cinema where they were more pronounced in their international productions. Probably the most unconventional I have seen, whilst really obscure, is the action film The Ultimate Mission (1988) starring Mark Gregory, who most will know for 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982), which was shot in North Korea. Dark Waters is something very different from that example, setting itself up as an incredibly atmospheric Lovecraftian-like religious horror tale. This is even established in the prologue, even when set in the daylight, where on an island, a priest nearly drowns only to be impaled in the neck on a statue like in a Lucio Fulci film set piece. A nun sacrifices her life, seemingly pushed off a cliff or jumping off it deliberately, to destroy a demonic talisman. Unfortunately, the pieces are collected back up by the others nuns, and it will come back to haunt the entire environment.

Twenty years later, a young woman named Elizabeth (Louise Salter) goes back to the island where this all transpired, where the convent was being sent payments from her recently passed father. It should immediately set alarm bells for her when she is even about to reach the island, passing hooded monks carrying burning totems in a field at night for one of the first strong images of the production. Not in terms of this writer being anti-religious but, considering what ungodly blasphemy has transpired on that aforementioned island near them, the monks had the hindsight to have the break out the most ominous looking ritual, all to purge any influence creeping inland. To even get to the island, Elizabeth struggling to, the only person with a boat willing to take her on a rainy night is a man explicitly saying he is not afraid of death, and whose closest thing to a cabin boy is a half feral man who eats raw meat straight off the poop deck.

Dark Waters does have some cheese, some slow passages needing to set the plot up, and feels the limitations that literature or a video game could have dealt with. This film has atmosphere through the gills, but unlike those mediums, the issues of limited film budgets or production difficulties can plague cinema, and it feels like Mariano Baino's sole theatrical length work had teething issues off-camera alongside the oppressive nature of the premise. I am fully aware director Baino had a difficult production cycle making Dark Waters, at a cost of the distinct on-location sets in Ukraine which add so much production value, so as much of the issues could have come from this messy cycle. When the film is focused, cutting into Lucio Fulci's more morbidly gorgeous horror movie moments, it really crawls under the skin. The broken talisman established in the prologue, and its connection to an unknown evil of a beast, "the alpha and the omega", leads to a religious convent on the island which has slowly unravelled the longer this beast is there radiating its evil. Something like a whole group of nuns flagellating themselves in the candle lit underground caves is pure Catholic Gothicism, but even without one of the nuns being murdered when investigating the convent, there are clear signs of madness here which make of a lot of the film's best aspects and show more is hidden here for Elizabeth to accidentally find out about.

The beast apparently takes the sight of those who see it, and evoking the ending of Fulci's The Beyond (1981), Elizabeth will encounter a lot of blind individuals, including the matriarch of the nunnery, evoking this alarm. Even when the beast is rendered, if still lovingly, by a rubber monster effect, there are the disturbing sights which are far more potent, such as the image of the beach covered entire in dead fish, never explained but is the type of production detail that adds far more than explicit sights. It is the type of sight, perfectly executed here, where atheists and Christians, even the Satanists, would join forced to stop the influence causing it, and a huge virtue and the most disturbing parts of Dark Waters are the slowly creeping dread than the explicit horror. As Elizabeth slowly regains her memories of the island, having been born there, the filming locations add a great deal to the production as does the almost atonal score by Igor Clark, catching you off guard at times with its hair rising and at times unpredictable spikes in the soundtrack.

As Elizabeth realises her direct connection to the beast, even if the practical effects for once are more ridiculous for the tone, the mood is what bolsters the film fully. The sense of the peace having long been unravelled is found in the odd touches, like one of the few men on the island, alongside the weird one in a beach cabin, being a blind painter who seemingly depicts the future in his craft. Details like this adds so much to the proceedings and really made this a compelling horror story in the best of ways, even if this would be the sole production by its director/co-writer, the only other being The Trinity of Darkness (2014), a compilation of three of his older short films. This is a shame, and with what Dark Waters manages to accomplish by its final images, we could have had many potent horror films if Mariano Baino had been allowed/or wished to continue in theatrical film productions.