Jennifer Connelly admits she's not the biggest fan of horror movies, though she would like it made clear she has no bias.

"It's just not something I gravitate to normally, mostly because my movie-watching time is pretty limited," says Connelly, who has two boys, Kai, who will turn 8 this month, and (with her husband, actor Paul Bettany) Stellan, 23 months.

"But when I do see something frightening, it tends to stick with me," she says. "I remember seeing 'Dressed to Kill' somehow when I was about 10, and being pretty traumatized."

A little less than two years ago, Connelly made one of her rare excursions to Scaryville to watch "Honogurai mizu no soko kara," a 2002 thriller directed and written by Hideo Nakata. He is a master of the genre known to its growing number of American fans as "J-horror" as in Japanese, even though the style has spread to other Asian countries.

It wasn't a random choice. Connelly was sent the video by Brazilian director Walter Salles, who made two of her favorite films: "Central Station" and "The Motorcycle Diaries." Salles was planning to remake "Honogurai" as his first English language film, and wanted Connelly to star in it. After watching the film, which she says she found "lyrical and very emotionally moving" and reading a script by Rafael Yglesias ("Fearless"), Connelly signed on.

The film, "Dark Water," opened nationwide Friday.

"It's not a horror movie in the way people think of horror movies today, with all the blood and gore," says Connelly. "It's a ghost story, and it transcends the genre, I think, to become something of its own. It's ultimately a story about the love of a mother for her child, each haunted in different ways."

Salles says he has admired Connelly as an actor since her first film in 1984, Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America," in which she had been cast when she was 11 after someone saw her modeling portfolio. He calls her an "actor of extraordinary sensitivity and intelligence." But according to "Dark Water" executive producer Ashley Kramer, Salles had a reason for casting Connelly beyond his overall admiration.

"Walter thought it was very important to have a mother play Dahlia," Kramer says of Connelly's character. "He felt it was essential to find an actress who could understand in her soul that bond between mother and child and this quality really shows in Jennifer's performance."

Connelly's Dahlia is a New Yorker locked into an angry custody dispute with her ex-husband (Dougray Scott), who has left her for another woman. Unable to afford Manhattan rents but wanting to live somewhere with a good school within walking distance for her daughter Ceci (Ariel Gade), she lets a real estate agent (John C. Reilly) pressure her into taking a cramped apartment in a dilapidated and ugly housing block on Roosevelt Island, an uninviting strip of land that was once home primarily to a city hospital, a mental asylum and a prison. They are barely settled in before strange things begin to happen, including an unidentifiable black liquid that seems to ooze from a ceiling.

While praising Salles, Connelly says that being a mother might "have made it connect with my character," but says she hardly considers it a qualification.

"I certainly didn't take drugs when I played an addict in 'Requiem for a Dream' and I don't take drugs now, but I was able, I hope, to understand that character enough to make her convincing. I play fictional characters. I don't feel the need to become them. ... I know some actors who do work that way, and that's great for them. But for me, it's storytelling."

It was 2000's "Requiem," a dark, independent drama that harrowingly depicted the decline of a pill-addicted woman, her junkie son and her son's partner, played by Connelly, that reminded the world of Connelly's capabilities; in a scene that is almost always described as "brave," Connelly ends up prostituting herself in a motel-room sex show to get money for a fix.

It was seeing "Requiem" that inspired director Ron Howard to cast Connelly as the wife of the mentally ill mathematician John Nash (Russell Crowe) in 2001's "A Beautiful Mind," for which she won an Academy Award. (It is also where she met husband-to-be Bettany, who co-starred in the film.)

Since getting married, she and Bettany have coordinated their working schedules so one can play parent and partner while the other is working. She spent a few "very contented" months in Vancouver, where Bettany was shooting "Firewall," to be released next year. (Bettany also has a supporting role in Howard's adaptation of "The Da Vinci Code," coming out next summer.) Now, he's looking after the kids while she makes "Little Children," which she describes as a satire about "playground politics" directed by Todd Field ("In the Bedroom"), playing one of a group of suburban parents who compete vicariously through their kids.

"It's a supporting role, really, but I have no problem whatsoever with that, especially when I'm supporting someone like Kate Winslet, who has the lead," Connelly says. "Winning the Oscar shouldn't necessarily relegate you only to parts in which your name comes first. ... I'm happy to listen to suggestions from other people about my career, but at the end of the day, it's me making all the decisions. I couldn't do it another way."