Review: Deep Water
Perhaps the best marketing strategy for a movie is to: 1) be an erotic adult film in the crosshairs of squeaky-clean Disney’s 20th Century Fox acquisition, and 2) be pushed back so many times that the two leading actors went through a full boom-bust cycle of a paparazzi-laden romance. Finally dumped on Disney-owned Hulu, Deep Water’s fascinating developmental and release hell may get plenty of eyes on the thriller, but no amount of celebrity gossip and mystery will resuscitate the resulting catatonic film.
Deep Water pairs Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas as husband and wife, Vic and Melinda. Despite having a doe-eyed daughter and plenty of money, the couple lands in murky water when Melinda can’t seem to stop herself from gallivanting her extramarital love affairs all around New Orleans. In a not-so-subtle twist, these same men die mysterious deaths not long after becoming an object of Melinda’s desires. Local writer and acquaintance Don Wilson (Tracy Letts) is convinced Vic is the culprit, and Melinda seems strangely attracted to her husband’s potential murderous tendencies.
Director Adrian Lyne came out of a 20-year retirement for Deep Water, adding a final gasping contribution to the erotic thriller genre after his string of 80s and 90s blockbuster hits Fatal Attraction, 9 ½ Weeks, and Indecent Proposal. Lyne, champion of middle-aged people having sex, teams up with a screenplay co-written by Euphoria showrunner Sam Levinson, champion of teenagers having sex. What results is little sex and two deeply unlikeable main characters.
Melinda, a glorified lust robot, gives full musical performances in Italian, orders mac and cheese at fancy restaurants, and possesses seemingly no conscious at all. If anything, the improbable was achieved—a female such a mashup of quirky details and male fantasies that she would be impossible to find in real life.
Vic is a sad sack of a character who has more sexual tension with his pet snails he bathes under the bathroom faucet. The fact he actually speaks to his daughter, and entertains her tendency to play “Old Macdonald Had a Farm” on loop, is bafflingly assumed to be enough humanizing for a serial murderer. The two, together, represent an unrelatable, privileged couple whose main activities are swanky house parties with a full bar and live band.
The erotic thriller genre has critical merit and a target audience rarely satisfied since the 90s— the most notable recent contribution being 2014’s Gone Girl—featuring a more complex character and performance from Affleck, most likely cast in Deep Water to reprise the victimized husband role. Erotic thrillers are typically ripe for filmmakers to try their hand at effecting, addictive tension. Psychological warfare in the confines of a marriage reliably creates internal conflict filled with quiet horror grounded in the mundane.
What made previous Lyne films insanely watchable is their proximity to real life. Maybe it’s Diane Lane unglamorously taking the subway and battling wind with groceries in hand in Unfaithful. Or maybe it’s Michael Douglas going through the thrills of suburban house hunting and working an office job in Fatal Attraction. Taking normal human desires and the run-of-the-mill functionality of marriage through people who feel real, albeit overtly sexual, perverts the familiar into thrilling discomfort. Instead, Deep Water’s characters and setting are a mixture of extravagance and drained emotions that devolve into a flattened fever dream that is both unrelatable and undesirable.
Based on a 1957 Patricia Highsmith novel, the 2022 adaptation of Deep Water chooses to divert from the original book ending in a messy, insane third act that strips a key ingredient from a successful erotic thriller. A character is allowed to be unlikeable if they suffer a cruel ending fate, but it’s a huge hurdle for the viewer to jump if the unlikeable characters are seemingly untouchable. Self-absorbed Vic and Melinda suffer no consequences for their unquestionably bad morals, whether it be death, arrest, or haunting paranoia; the characters themselves seem detached from their actions altogether that it’s hard to believe anyone was murdered throughout the movie, let alone multiple.
Unfortunately for Disney and Affleck, who reportedly tried to kill the movie post-breakup with de Armas, the waters weren’t quite deep enough to scrub this movie from public attention, or to distract from the indefensible audacity of its main characters.
Elisabeth Oster 