explain the ending please...

Yoshimi is a ghost.

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this might b the way i saw it, but it seemed to me that mother gave her life to save the daughter. That's what i understood when she said her mother was protecting her as tho the ghost didnt want to share "her mother" with anyone else or if u dont want to b my momy, then ill take your daughter.

I defenitely want to see this one again to see if i still feel the same as my interpretation.

Mitsuko (the dead girl) takes Yoshimi. Yoshimi tells Ikuko to stay away from her, so that Ikuko can live. Otherwise, they would both have died.

Are you really so *beep* stupid, that you wont get it yourself?

The only thing that confused me a little about the ending is why the appartment seemed completely untouched after 10 years. I assume that it was some sort of illusion created by Yoshimi, though.

There is no ghost. It is all imagination by the mother, imaging she had mental problems!
At the end the daughter believed this stories of the ghost the mother told her and so she sees the mother. But then she recognized that it is not real and so she doesn't see the mother anymore.


Another explanation: The daughter lost her mother by an accident or something else, and bacause kids have a rich fantasy she builds the whole story of the missed girl, the wet flat inly in her mind.

Hi. The way I see it is thus: The film depicts a story involving a mother coming to terms with her repressed past which has bubbled to the surface due to the recent events involving the other missing child Mitsuko. It is then the mother's duty to face her past and her mistreatment by her own mother (if you remember her aunt mentions how bad a mother her sister was and there are various mentions of the psychological affect that this has had on Yoshima) in order to not pass down her past to her own child. Thus Ikuko is freed from her Mother's *beep* up past. The message being that one must face the repressed in order to eliminate it, otherwise it will haunt you all your life. Yoshima faces her past and embraces Mitsuko (who is essentially herself as a child) in order to protect Ikuko from being treated the same way.

Thanks, this question helped me to define for me what it is about the original Asian ghost films that I prefer to the Hollywood remakes. The Hollywood versions have (arguably) higher production values and better actors, but more "pored over" scripts. It's like the American re-writers have had committee meetings about what the original movie was about and have discussed how to present this on a plate for the American - and I'm Australian but I count Australia as a suburb of the US for movie market purposes at least - audience.
The problem with this "worked out" script is that it's taken the viewer's decision making away. If you want to know what the Asian horror movie you just watched was about, just watch the Hollywood remake and it will beat it over your head with a cudgel. And you might gain something - you can call it understanding if you like - but you lose more I think. Because isn't a supernatural story inherently a mystery?
Dark Water is not even the worst example of this. Check out the difference between A Tale of Two Sisters and The Uninvited, for example. Is subtlety overrated? I don't think so.
I like to have questions in my head after watching a movie, and that's what you get with (some of these) the Asian movies. Not all of them - I didn't have any questions after Gin Gwai, for example, so I didn't have any curiosity about checking out The Eye.