I couldn’t help but get a little excited when I saw Deep Water was directed by Adrian Lyne. That’s the Fatal Attraction, 9 1/2 Weeks, Indecent Proposal, Unfaithful Adrian Lyne: the king of the erotic thriller. There are pieces of something really lurid and sexy in Deep Water. However, much like Ben Affleck’s character, perhaps time and age have detached Lyne from the thriller’s he’s become so famous for directing.
Vic (Affleck) and Melinda (Ana de Armas) Van Allen are trapped in a loveless marriage because they share a 4 year old daughter Trixie (Grace Jenkins). To keep Melinda from leaving, Vic allows her to date whomever she wants, so long as she keeps up appearances with Trixie and their friends (Lil Rel Howery, Tracy Letts, Dash Mihok, Rachel Blanchard, and Kristen Connolly). However, as more time passes, Melinda has become more reckless, constantly flirting and disappearing with new “friends” she makes (Jacob Elordi and Finn Wittrock for example). This takes the completely detached Vic and enrages him, forcing him to take drastic measures to keep appearances.
There’s no shortage of modern sexual exploits Lyne could have gone down for Deep Water: a legitimate study of open relationships, cuckolding, or violent sexual fantasies are all right there, ready to be f*cked on a table. But the first hour of this movie is too obsessed with the loveless relationship, forcing the audience into watching nearly unbearable scenes of cruelty, or worse, stupidity. Affleck’s take on the character makes him basically a brick wall, meaning de Armas really has to ham it up for the audience to be into Deep Water at all. Try as she might, de Armas can’t f*ck a brick wall, so we’re left with Revolutionary Road without the good acting. 15 minutes in I was actively scrolling through my phone, waiting for a party or another de Armas striptease to keep my attention at all.
So thank god for the final 30 minutes, where Lyne basically says f*ck it. Not sexually, but with the plot, which straight up goes off the rails. Trixie, the 4 year old, reenacts a murder, the slug motif (please say this out loud, it’s f*cking hilarious) sorta pays off , a guy in a car is afraid of someone on a bicycle, someone gets autocorrected on text as a pivotal plot point, and we learn apparently Deep Water’s town has no police (all outsourced to other cities) because it’s 1000000% clear who the murderer probably is. I should’ve been mad, but I was mostly overjoyed the movie played this insanity completely straight, making it get funnier and funnier as it went along.
On the whole, Deep Water is a missed opportunity. I really thought a Ben Affleck/Ana de Armas open relationship erotic thriller by Adrian Lyne just had to ham it up and be overly lurid to win everybody over. Instead, it tries so hard to get you to care about the people in this loveless marriage, it keeps brining in new “friends” to test the depths these people go to to be together. Apparently Sam Levinson found the town where all the kids from Euphoria high school grow up and move to. So…congrats to them and their loveless marriages!