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Dark Water
(Walter Salles, 2005) renders the plight
of its heroine, Dahlia (Jennifer Connelly), equally affecting. The hus-
band’s infidelity forces the family apart in this version and he stoops
low in the custody battle over their daughter, Ceci (Ariel Gade), using
Dahlia’s troubled childhood to question her sanity and suitability as a
mother. Once again, the mother proves herself in a way no court would
comprehend. When a ghostly girl takes up residence with them, Dahlia
makes the ultimate gesture of maternal virtue, sacrificing herself to save
Ceci. Interestingly, a favourite game involves Dahlia playing an ogress,
pretending to devour Ceci, a subtle reference perhaps to the accusation
made by her husband’s legal team (and wider society) – that a single
mother like herself may damage her daughter, just as her own mother
is deemed to have damaged her. The film partly supports the idea that
Dahlia is a victim of her mother’s malign influence (experiencing flash-
backs to an unhappy childhood), yet profound economic and gender
inequalities are still more strongly critiqued (forced to downsize both
her home and job because her former husband wishes to eliminate her
from his new family set-up). The ending’s alignment with the husband’s
Houses of Horror
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wishes is disconcerting, removing Dahlia from his life and granting him
custody of their daughter. The sacrifices she makes range from taking
a job for which she is vastly overqualified (attracted by the healthcare
plan) to courageously seeking to put an unhappy soul to rest, yet like the
original film’s heroine,
Dahlia must ultimately forfeit the thing she most
desires: her ability to live with her daughter. The ending may affirm that
she lives on in some way, braiding Ceci’s hair in a touching affirmation
of their mother–daughter bond, yet she is nonetheless prevented from
raising her. The motif of a dead mother watching over her child from
beyond the grave reprises the consolatory leanings of fairy tales like
‘The Juniper Tree’ and early versions of ‘Cinderella’, yet the insistence
on such a tragic end remains unsettling, as is the suggestion that ‘trou-
bled’ women find some kind of peace through death (where they get to
mother unhappy spirits in lieu of their own offspring).
Laura (Belén Rueda) in
The Orphanage
(J.A. Bayona, 2007) is, like Dahlia,
haunted by an unhappy childhood, and condemned to an equivalent
fate. She returns to the orphanage she grew up in, hoping to transform
it into a happy family home and give children like herself a better start.
However, this would-be home is a sinister place, filled with unhappy
spirits, and tragedy results. Laura’s adopted son goes missing and
is presumed dead. She eventually discovers his body in a basement and
realises that she is to blame, having bricked up the doorway without
realising that he was hiding inside. Consumed by guilt, she takes pills to
end her torment, and begs the child spirits murdered at this site to allow
her son to return to her. Mother and son are duly reunited in death, and
with her former playmates gathered around, her desire to take care of
needy children is bizarrely fulfilled.
‘A mother’s love is forever’ – so reads the tag line of another film pro-
duced by Guillermo del Toro – although the context makes the refrain
as disturbing as it is comforting.
Mama
(Andrés Muschietti, 2013) is
effectively a haunted house tale in which a young woman battles a
possessive female spirit, acquiring maternal feelings for her two charges
along the way. The vast Gothic home is provided by a psychiatric insti-
tution to house two traumatised children, recently discovered in a cabin
in the woods where they apparently lived alone for four years. As we
learn, they were not truly alone, with ‘Mama’ (a ghostly woman who
once lived in the cabin) watching over them and following them to
their new home. A custody battle ensues as Mama hospitalises their new
guardian, Uncle Luke (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), forcing his girlfriend
to take care of them. Annabel (Jessica Chastain), a musician in a rock
band, who starts the film thanking god her pregnancy test is negative
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