Feature

Brownstone of Death

“Roosevelt Island has a very strange past,” Connelly says. “It was originally a refuge for smallpox; there was a hospital for terminal cases, and there was this insane asylum there for a long time, which is in decay.”

Filming there apparently creeped her out. “It’s isolated, a bit freaky, and almost feels stuck in a different time,” she says, peppering her gothic description with Briticisms like “daggy” poached from her English husband, actor Paul Bettany. “The stuff in storefront windows—strange picture frames—look like they’re from a different era. I find it to be a really lonely place.”

Nakata’s horror—from Ringu to Dark Water—always relies more on suspenseful atmospherics than gore or monsters—and Connelly says Salles’s adaptation stays true to his vision. There’s still water that seeps through the walls and gushes from the ceilings, “but I don’t think it sells out,” she says. “It’s not all-of-a-sudden gory, and Walter adapted it for our vocabulary.”

Case in point: The Realtor who assists her character is played by John C. Reilly as a “kind of shifty guy—eccentric and frightening, a classic New York real-estate agent,” says Connelly. I confess my own nightmares about agents. “No,” she reassures me, “he doesn’t work for Corcoran.”

All new yorkers have housing horror stories; most star themselves. Connelly’s is a classic, and, like many, it starts off in a small Manhattan studio.

“I got so fed up with my first apartment,” she says, talking with her hands. At first, her thin fingers splay elegantly in front of her, extending from slim black jacket sleeves, but they begin to jab and weave as she tells her story. “I almost moved into a place over a funeral parlor. My father said, ‘That’s just too macabre,’ but I thought I’d be embracing my mortality. I told him it would keep me grounded—like when people get skull tattoos.”

“I remember looking at people, thinking, ‘He’s still in the same neighborhood. What a loser!’ Now I ask myself, ‘I’m not a failure, right?’’’

Connelly toughed out a few more years in her small apartment, then, in her mid-twenties, she found a doorman building, just as she was emerging as a cover-girl movie star. “I didn’t have to check the closets or open the shower curtains when I came home at night. And it was the first apartment I ever had where I didn’t do that—because I used to have an apartment in Soho that had this fire escape, and one time I looked out and saw someone standing there.”

Still, even that apartment became horrific when Connelly had a child (with photographer David Dugan), and then a second with Bettany, forcing her to crowd a family of four into her one-bedroom set-up. “Bringing home a new lipstick became a crisis,” she says, much less an Oscar (which she won in 2001 for A Beautiful Mind). “Where do you put it? It was mad. Finally, it could go on no longer.”

So last year, the movie stars Connelly and Bettany rubbed two pennies together and bought a big Brooklyn townhouse with “a nice backyard and a place for the bicycles”—not far from where Connelly, a Saint Ann’s grad, grew up in Brooklyn Heights. (“I remember looking at people and thinking, ‘He’s still in the same neighborhood. What a loser!’ ” Connelly says. “Now I ask myself, ‘I’m not a failure, right?’ ”)

Connelly’s story seemed to be over—but, per horror formula, real-estate terror lurched back into her life. Connelly’s dream home soon had “two massive floods that completely trashed the whole kitchen,” she says, eyes flashing wide, fingernails flying. “Water coming out of the light fixtures. Pipes burst. Twice! They dispatched the Fire Department.”

The cause? Connelly half-suspects her director, who was courting her to appear in his watery film. “It happened soon after I had Walter over to the house,” she confides, hands suddenly settled primly in her lap. “I hold Walter personally responsible.”

Finally, Connelly and her family are safe. This summer, they’ll spend time in the park and check out films at “BAM, Film Forum, the Angelika.” Grisly death intrudes occasionally—a floating pet fish, say—but Connelly’s kids are tough: “Kai’s a New York kid—savvy,” she explains proudly. “If all goes wrong? Sushi.”

So everything’s fine—or is it?

“He came home from school the other day; their class had put together a poetry book,” she recalls. “I open it: ‘Blood from ceilings,’ really macabre stuff. One kid wrote about ‘longing and desperation twirling in upon itself.’ The second-graders in Brooklyn are reading Edgar Allan Poe! It’s weird—but that’s New York.”