Dark Water

Nakata's other film, and the saddest thing the J-horror cycle produced.

A woman in a custody battle moves into a damp apartment block with her small daughter. There is a stain on the ceiling that keeps growing, a red bag that keeps returning, and a child on the roof.

The horror is entirely domestic. The building is failing, the lift is unreliable, the landlord will not fix anything, and the legal process is treating her as unstable, which is exactly what a haunting will look like to a family court.

Hitomi Kuroki carries it and the film's final act asks something of her that the standard ghost story never does.

Adapted from Koji Suzuki, who also wrote Ringu. The American remake with Jennifer Connelly is unusually decent and still not this.