La Promesse de l'Eau

I thought this was supposed to be a straight horror movie and not a crime thriller. The movie's description in the streaming site was a little misleading. It was even placed in their horror section so that was a bit odd. But now that gripe is over, onto the movie.

I wanted to like it, but I struggled to keep my attention. It started off reasonably well, but the story became weak until it stumbled to a rather lazy conclusion.

There was real character development and the dialogue was cliched to say the least. This is shame because I wanted to like this movie, The music and photography were both fine but the acting could have been better.

This is not one of the better crime thrillers out there.

Beware this movie does have two sexual scenes that are explicit. The mystery story plot was good with a surprise near the end. Acting was okay. It is a French movie that has been voiced over with English. The plot centers around Two brothers both in the police field that are trying to solve a murder of the boyfriend of the daughter of one of them. Action is good in the movie. People are murdered to cover up the truth about some shady business practices. All in all it kept my attention throughout. I would recommend it except for the sex scenes being inappropriate for younger audiences. Definitely should be R rated.

It is rated 16+, but in the version I saw, if you blinked hard, you would miss the two scenes that may have resulted in that rating. It is a French movie, and dubbed, and for me, that is probably why the dialogue feels stilted. It doesn't seem to have a natural flow of speaking. There are two brothers, one a police officer, and the other in CID, and for one brother, his daughter is pregnant by one of the murder victims. And their parents are rather snoopy, and stick their noses into the case. As they find more and more bodies, there seems to be interconnections between them and point back to a link to the family. So this requires an unraveling of many different connections, many which seem totally unrelated. And that leads to making the movie more interesting.

La Promesse de l'Eau, which in English became Troubled Waters, failed for me because the expectations that the synopsis generated were not met. However, I need to point out that the main flaw is the people at Netflix Brazil, who pointed out the film as being a horror film, when La Promesse de l'Eau is actually a crime film that looks more like a TV series.

Maybe La Promesse de l'Eau comes from some series that I don't know, in fact. The story has some holes, not by omission, but because it seems that some television series answers these holes, as if the audience already knows these characters. Imagine a CSI movie - which I think exists, - that's how I felt watching La Promesse de l'Eau.

Regardless of this fact, the plot is engaging enough to keep us hooked - a shame it does'nt pay off. We want to know who is behind the murder of Thubault, who is the son-in-law of Guillaume, the protagonist.

Guillaume's arc is weak, it doesn't complete. Guillaume has a silly nitpicking with his brother, something the film doesn't elaborate on why - maybe that's another one of the holes. In the end, Guillaume ends the story the same way he began, no transformation.

The final reveal is too unsatisfying and surreal. Other holes appear, such as a trafficking case and the whole Medusa mask case, which ends without any outcome.

La Promesse de l'Eau is a weak film. Skip it.