There are horror films you endure, horror films you forget, and horror films that seep into your bloodstream like some unholy baptism and never leave. Mariano Baino’s Dark Waters—a rain-soaked, nun-haunted slice of Eastern European gothic—is the last kind. It’s the movie you stumble across late at night and wake up wondering if you actually saw or just hallucinated after mixing communion wine with NyQuil.
And that’s exactly why it’s brilliant.
Welcome to the Island, Population: Trauma
Our protagonist is Elizabeth (Louise Salter), a young Englishwoman whose father has died and left her with two burdens: his estate and his creepy habit of funneling cash into an island convent. Deciding to investigate, Elizabeth heads to this rock in the middle of nowhere, where the locals are friendly in the way that rusty bear traps are friendly. She arrives in the middle of a rainstorm so relentless it feels like God Himself is trying to drown the movie before it starts.
Inside the convent, Elizabeth encounters the Mother Superior, who is blind, ancient, and just one ominous Latin chant away from full-on Pope Innocent cosplay. The nuns are not the kind of smiling penguin-suited women you remember from The Sound of Music. These ones look like they’ve been mainlining mold spores since 1863.
Elizabeth is paired with Sarah, a seemingly innocent novice who radiates the kind of vibes you normally only get from people who offer you “just one drink” before they pull out the chloroform. Together, they wander through libraries filled with occult illustrations, corpse processions in catacombs, and more religious iconography than Mel Gibson’s vision board.
Nuns, Demons, and Family Reunions from Hell
This is not your usual “plucky girl versus spooky convent” tale. The deeper Elizabeth goes, the clearer it becomes that she isn’t just an outsider poking at ancient secrets—she is the ancient secret.
Her mother, it turns out, was less “pious housewife” and more “demonic fertility experiment gone wrong.” Sarah, the doe-eyed novice, isn’t her innocent guide at all but her half-sister, complete with body horror upgrades that look like H.R. Giger got drunk and doodled in the margins of a Bible.
The convent’s nuns, far from protecting Elizabeth, have been trying to keep her from reawakening the family business: a sealed-away demon mother itching for a comeback tour. And when the ritual begins, all hell literally starts to break loose.
Elizabeth, being the responsible sibling, opts out of summoning Satan’s mom back into the world. Sarah, being the fun sibling, runs toward the horror like it’s Christmas morning. It’s a family drama that makes Thanksgiving dinner look like a Hallmark movie.
Atmosphere: Wet, Moldy, and Sublime
Let’s be honest: plot is not the real reason Dark Waters works. What makes this movie extraordinary is its atmosphere.
Shot in the crumbling monasteries and storm-battered landscapes of Ukraine, the film looks like it was forged in mildew and despair. The walls drip with decay, the sky is permanently overcast, and the sea is a roiling mass of gray death. Even the cats look depressed.
Mariano Baino makes every frame feel like an icon painting smeared with blood. There’s very little dialogue; instead, you get whispering wind, flickering candles, and the sound of water dripping endlessly in stone corridors. It’s less like watching a horror movie and more like being dragged through a fever dream guided by a demon tour guide with a flair for gothic set design.
Performances: Human, but Just Barely
Louise Salter carries the film with a mix of fragility and determination. She’s the audience’s surrogate, wide-eyed and horrified but also stubborn enough to keep prying open doors that clearly lead to doom. By the end, when she takes up the Mother Superior’s cataract-clouded gaze, you believe this poor woman has been spiritually eroded into something both holy and monstrous.
Sarah (Venera Simmons) deserves her own mention. At first she’s sweet, timid, practically a Disney sidekick. By the time she’s revealing her body as part-demon and trying to finish Mommy’s summoning ritual, she’s transformed into a living embodiment of betrayal. If you’ve ever had a sibling who stole your toys and tried to sacrifice you to a Lovecraftian womb-beast, you’ll relate.
The Gore: Sparing but Effective
Unlike its splatter-happy cousins of the early ’90s, Dark Waters doesn’t drown you in buckets of gore. Instead, it serves its violence like a fine wine—sparingly, but with a punch.
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A nun plummets out a window in a death scene so abrupt it feels like divine slapstick.
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Corpses wrapped in bloodied sheets are paraded through catacombs with unsettling reverence.
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A blind painter covers his walls with faces of the damned, one of which happens to look suspiciously like Elizabeth’s missing friend.
It’s grotesque without being cartoonish, proof that you don’t need gallons of fake blood to unsettle an audience—you just need to film a convent like it’s a waiting room for Hell.
Themes: Faith, Family, and Fungal Growth
Dark Waters is loaded with themes so heavy they could sink a fishing trawler. Religion, repression, feminine identity, generational trauma—it’s all here, filtered through a lens of Eastern European despair.
Elizabeth’s journey is ultimately about inheritance: not money, but bloodlines, faith, and destiny. She doesn’t just inherit her father’s donations to the convent; she inherits her mother’s monstrous legacy, a sister fused with evil, and the kind of cataracts you don’t get from staring at a Game Boy too long.
If The Exorcist was about the terror of losing your child to evil, Dark Waters is about the terror of realizing you are the evil, and the church has just been babysitting you until puberty hits.
Why It Works (Even When It Shouldn’t)
Objectively, this film is a mess. The plot is thin, the pacing is glacial, and half the dialogue sounds like it was translated by a drunk seminarian. And yet… it works.
Why? Because Dark Waters commits. It drowns itself in atmosphere, embraces its surreal imagery, and never once winks at the camera. In an era when horror was becoming increasingly self-aware and ironic, Baino gave us a straight-faced gothic nightmare that feels timeless.
It’s not trying to entertain you. It’s trying to baptize you in dread, and by the time it’s over, you’re soaking wet, half-blind, and muttering Latin in your sleep.
Final Thoughts: Pray for Raincoats
Dark Waters is not for everyone. If you like your horror fast-paced, quippy, or blood-soaked, you’ll be bored stiff. But if you’re the kind of sick soul who enjoys being smothered by atmosphere, who finds comfort in images of nuns parading corpses under flickering candles, this film is your new religion.
It’s a rare thing: a horror movie that doesn’t just scare you in the moment but lingers in your bones, like dampness in an old cathedral. Watching it feels less like entertainment and more like confession. And when it’s over, you’re not sure if you’ve been absolved or damned.
So grab a raincoat, light a candle, and prepare to question everything you know about faith, family, and the durability of convent architecture.
Because in Dark Waters, salvation isn’t guaranteed—but mildew absolutely is.
