Review: Dark Waters (1994)

Directed by: Mariano Baino
Starring: Louise Salter, Venera Simmons, Maria Kapnist
Written by: Mariano Baino, Andrew M. Bark
Music by: Igor Clark
Country: Italy, Ukraine
Available on: Blu-ray (Severin Films)
IMDb

The debut feature from co-writer/director Mariano Baino is a potent miasma of churning, sea-spackled Lovecraftian nightmares as synthesized by Lucio Fulci or Michele Soavi. This film about a young woman attending to some vague business at an oceanside convent infested by weirdos and secretive nuns partaking in esoteric, sacrosanct rituals to monstrous creatures is ultra-creepy stuff, but your taste for it all will depend on your willingness to forego things like expository dialog, “acting,” traditional plot, brisk pacing, and daylight. Dark Waters is a dank, winding journey through Hell’s wet underbelly. Messiah of Evil (1973) immediately comes to mind; both concern opaque, wicked lineages between fathers and daughters that come to light at a seaside perdition. Everything in this film is off-kilter, from the way everyone speaks in a nigh-whimsical sing-song drone-whisper that could function as some kind of diabolical ASMR, to the strobing lights that make the convent’s catacombs look like a Luciferian nightclub, to the bizarre score that sounds written by someone with only a vague idea of what music is, recorded with a decrepit keyboard and four-track found in the dusty corner of an estate sale. Filmed in Ukraine and Kiev after the fall of the Soviet Union, Dark Waters apparently had a very difficult production not at all helped by the political volatility of their shooting location. But Baino and company’s trials pay off with gorgeously ominous scenery that serves the film’s thick atmospherics well. The movie is rich with fascinating, stark imagery and sound, and foreboding, mysterious evils, though Baino and co-writer Andy Bark really don’t have any interest in satisfying the curiosity of the audience. You’re never going to find out why the nuns engage in all their strange rituals or, really, do any of the things they do in this movie. You’ll never know the nature of the grotesque being at the center of it all. Most components of this film exist solely to reinforce the ghastly images the filmmakers had in their skulls to put to celluloid. But as a pure, arthouse-leaning exercise in visualizing a few dark recesses of humankind’s cosmic fears, this is a very impressive flick that’ll stick with you and grow under your flesh like a nasty, eldritch mold from out of space.

Overall rating: 8 out of 10