  Recent experiments reporting a very low dielectric permittivity for
nanoconfined water have renewed the interest to the structure and dielectric
properties of water in narrow gaps. Here, we describe such systems with a
minimal Landau-Ginzburg field-theory composed of a nonlocal bulk-determined
term and a local water-surface interaction term. We show how the interplay
between the boundary conditions and intrinsic bulk correlations encodes
dielectric properties of confined water. Our theoretical analysis is supported
by molecular dynamics simulations and comparison with the experimental data.
