DARK WATER, Hideo Nakata's follow-up to his successful THE RING (RINGU), tells the story of Yoshimi (Hitomi Kuroki) who is in an intense custody battle with her husband over their 6 year old daughter Ikuko (Rio Kanno). Needing to show herself competent, Yoshimi rents an apartment in an old building and looks for a job. The apartment is dank but livable with only a slowly-spreading water stain on the ceiling. Ikuko finds a Hello Kitty bag (which reappears no matter how many times Yoshimi throws it away) and starts to hear footsteps in the overhead abandoned apartment. Yoshimi learns that a little girl living in the apartment above mysteriously vanished a year before and after catching glimpses of a DON'T LOOK NOW-esque child-size figure in a raincoat starts to look into the disappearance as others start to question her sanity and ability to take care of her daughter who seems to be in supernatural danger. DARK WATER arrived in the US some time after its release (around the time of its American remake) and audiences who had seen plenty of post-RINGU Asian horror movies (as well as many "am I insane or are ghosts real?") will know the score but DARK WATER hits the right emotional notes during its climax and its ending is satisfying without condescending to a final shock.

In AUDITION, widower Shigeharu (Ryo Ishibashi) is talked into holding auditions to meet a woman by his business partner. He becomes interested in shy and demure Asami (Eihi Shiina) and sets about courting her only to discover twisted and grisly reasons for Asami's elusive and evasive manner. Audiences familiar with the work of Takashi Miike know not to be fooled by the sedate arthouse pacing of the film which actually works in the film's favor leaving the viewer unnerved but totally unprepared for the descent into the extremes of the film's last third.

In THE EYE, Mun (Angelica Lee) who has been blind since childhood receives a cornea transplant and regains her sight. The unnerving blurred peripheral figures that plague her restored vision soon make themselves more evident as ghostly apparitions. With the help of a young doctor/love interest, Mun searches for the identity of her eye donor and discovers that it was a Thai girl who was persecuted after foreseeing a fiery accident with multiple casualties and her abilities seem to have been passed on to Mun. Despite the many Asian horror tropes on hand, THE EYE is sufficiently unnerving and suspenseful for the most of its running time and would have been satisfying had it ended on the restrained "acknowledging the dead" climax but the Pang Bros. follow that up by decimating hundreds of extras (and a poor CGI rat) with a needless fiery surprise "it's not over yet" ending (then followed by a bittersweet coda). The film spawned two unrelated sequels (the third is a horror comedy).