Dark Waters (1994)

Following the death of her father, Elizabeth (Louise Salter) travels to a convent situated on a remote island somewhere in what I assume to be Eastern Europe. The film was at least shot in the Ukraine, and the rural folk our protagonist encounters are dressed in what looks to me like rural Eastern European garb, or rather the movie shorthand version thereof. It’s never quite clear to this viewer why Elizabeth is going there. In a curious coincidence, she is friends with one of the place’s nuns (as it happens the one we witness getting murdered by a robed figure before we meet Elizabeth) and wants to visit her; on the other hand, when she speaks to the blind abbess of the place, she talks how she found out that her father secretly financed the convent and wants to check it out. Or she has been called there and just doesn’t know it. She is, after all, born on the island, but doesn’t remember her living there or her family’s leaving anymore.

Elizabeth’s investigation of the cloister does uncover various strange things, like some books that tell a curious, occult version of Christianity, a system of tunnels below the place that’s basically a labyrinth full of nuns who seem to partake in rituals that don’t look properly Catholic to me. The labyrinth also harbours a blind monk doing rather good wall-paintings for someone who can’t see, featuring strange creatures as well as lots of blind people on them. And that’s only the strangeness before the nuns begin to turn aggressive, trying to kill Elizabeth for she doesn’t know what reason. She does attempt to leave at several points in time, but there’s always bad luck or malevolence keeping her on the island, pressing her into a confrontation with her childhood and the things she’s meant to do and be.

Mariano Baino’s Dark Waters is a wonderful late example of great Italian horror cinema, made at a time when the commercial bubble for Italian genre films had popped nearly completely, and most of the surviving filmmakers connected to the genre had long since made their way into TV careers or general oblivion. To make more out of what probably was a tiny budget, the film was shot in the Ukraine, with many technical positions as well as smaller roles in the cast filled by local professionals. On the production side, this made things rather difficult, it appears, but for the look of the films, the opportunity to shoot on sets and locations highly above what this kind of production could typically afford paid off wonderfully, providing the film with a distinctive look and a sense of place very much its own.

In mood and style, the film does feature quite a few nods to the greats of Italian supernatural horror, with coloured lighting sometimes hinting at Bava or Argento, and all the wetness and white, blind eyes of a Fulci film. However, Baino uses the elements and techniques of the tradition he is working in for a film with a quality all of its own, telling a story the big three wouldn’t have told exactly this way.

Of course, the film does have the dream-like quality of much of the best European supernatural horror films, but Baino does more gradually develop this than is typical of the form, showing Elizabeth increasingly stepping out of the world as we know it through her travels, first finding herself surrounded by ever stranger people who seem to share secrets she doesn’t know about, then becoming physically isolated on the island, finding herself dressed in a sack-like nun habit, encountering strange books and finally finding the labyrinth, the world becoming stranger and more threatening the closer she steps to the knowledge of her own past. All of this is portrayed by Baino in deeply atmospheric shots of decay, with lots of brackish water dripping everywhere loudly, disturbingly and inexorably, metaphorically standing in for all the inexorable and destructive forces we humans can’t really do much about. The camera is always suggesting someone or something watching Elizabeth, things happening just outside of her view or earshot, threatening her in ways more than just physical.

There is quite a bit of Lovecraft in the film too, the central supernatural conceit really feeling like one of HPL’s alien godlike creatures interpreted by nuns and superstitious locals through a lens of Christianity that doesn’t just distort what they are looking at but gets itself distorted by the thing seen through it. Furthermore, there’s a strong connection to Lovecraft’s recurring theme of biological and familial inheritance as doom (which is connected to but separate from his racist views, in my opinion), Elizabeth going back to roots she had probably better avoided.


Dark Waters is an absolutely fantastic film, taking everything I love about European/Italian horror, adding some Lovecraft and a smidgen of occultism, and presenting them in a visual language that’s as distinct as it is compelling. The only thing here that’s disappointing is the fact that Baino has barely had a career as a director after this; or rather, maddening and frustrating more than just disappointing.