In the 1990s and early 2000s the English director Adrian Lyne was one of the masters of the erotic thriller, the craftsman behind such suspenseful yet deeply silly entertainments as 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal, and Unfaithful. Now 81, he has returned from 20 years of retirement with a curious new entry in that too-long-moribund genre: Deep Water, a loose adaptation of a 1957 Patricia Highsmith novel of the same name that has previously been turned into a French movie and a German TV series.
Whether you find Deep Water deliciously preposterous or just … preposterous may depend on how much you miss that kind of movie. In my case, the answer is “a lot.” In the years of Lyne’s reign, also the heyday of softcore masterworks like Basic Instinct, Bound, and Wild Things, I whiled away many a pleasant evening watching good-looking movie stars, often bathed in attractively backlit sweat, trade steamy banter while secretly plotting to betray or murder one another. There’s a particular itch scratched by what might be called the domestic action movie: movies where an intimate physical relationship functions not as part of a romantic subplot, but as the main driver of the film’s suspense.
Deep Water understands and appreciates that pleasure, even if it doesn’t consistently manage to dole it out over its rocky two-hour runtime. As erotic thrillers go, this is a remarkably up-to-date one, far less judgmental about its lead couple’s wildly dysfunctional bond than, say, the fundamentally conservative Fatal Attraction, a movie that made sure its home-wrecking heroine suffered a fate as grim that of as the third act’s infamous pet rabbit. From Deep Water’s first scene, it’s clear Vic Van Allen (Ben Affleck) and his wife Melinda (Ana de Armas) share a kink so weird it puts bunny-boiling to shame.
Vic, a tech whiz who retired young and rich after building a chip used in military drones, seems masochistically drawn to standing mutely by while the much younger Melinda, a hard-drinking party girl, brazenly cheats on him with a string of interchangeable himbos. Or is it Melinda who is sadistically drawn to putting her husband through this very public form of hell, often at parties attended by their closest friends?
The Van Allens have a daughter, elementary-school-aged Trixie (the wonderfully self-possessed Grace Jenkins), who seems awfully well-adjusted for a kid with such messed-up parents: Her mother has a penchant for inviting her lovers over for awkward family dinners, then sending Vic and their child upstairs to read a bedtime story while she drinks and canoodles with the houseguest. Vic, for his part, finds it hilarious to claim to his wife and their friends that he was responsible for the disappearance of a common acquaintance who has gone missing—a man, it’s implied, who was one of Melinda’s earlier sexual conquests. When the missing person’s body is discovered and a probable suspect named, it seems clear the much-cuckolded Vic was only making a dark joke. But then bad things start to happen to other men in Vic and Melinda’s social circle, making the motives and intentions of the central couple that much harder to untangle.
Affleck and de Armas began their own, hopefully less toxic real-life relationship in 2019 while Deep Water was shooting; after the film was finished, it waited out two years of the pandemic on the shelf, by which point the couple had split up. Knowing this back story doesn’t significantly change the viewer’s experience of watching Deep Water, because sad-sack Vic and his dangerously beautiful wife aren’t meant to have “chemistry” in the traditional romantic sense of the word. On the contrary, their perverse interpersonal dynamic is driven by resentment, contempt, pathological jealousy, and some inexplicable mutual need to keep acting out the same humiliating scenario.
The absence of explanatory back story for either of these two sickos is one refreshing element of Deep Water. Vic and Melinda aren’t, as far as we can tell, haunted by any particular flashback-worthy past. They’re just weird people, as evidenced by Vic’s fondness for a damp, greenhouse-style room in their fancy suburban mansion where, again for no reason we are told, he enjoys raising snails. While Melinda’s lovers come and go, Vic putters in his snail-cave, sometimes holding two of the mollusks close together so their bodies oozily intertwine and, on at least one occasion, lifting a Petri-style dish full of live snails to his nose so he can inhale their scent. Ben Affleck sniffing his snails: that is what you are in for if you commit to watching Deep Water. If you find that idea intriguing, do read on.
The last third or so of Deep Water takes a swerve even farther from verisimilitude than the already not-that-believable storyline that preceded it. This is the kind of thriller where, whenever the protagonist turns on the TV, a news segment on a crime he or she may not have committed is just starting to air, and where any utterance of the line “We should have so-and-so over for dinner” is unceremoniously followed by a shot of so-and-so’s finger on the doorbell. The plotting is thin and the twists, especially in the last 10 minutes, ever more ridiculous. But a subplot about the cat-and-mouse game between Vic and Don (Tracy Letts), a local novelist acting as amateur gumshoe, crackles with morbid humor, verging at times on slapstick as Vic’s attempts to deceive the older man get clumsier and clumsier.
The would-be mastermind who’s nowhere as smart as he thinks he is has long been a staple of the noir murder mystery, with Double Indemnity and Body Heat being classics of the genre. Deep Water hardly belongs on a triple bill with those two masterpieces, but it plays on the audience’s familiarity with the archetype of the easily duped man twisted around the little finger of an ice-hearted femme fatale. Aware that the audience thinks it knows just where such a narrative will end up, Lyne does some twisting of the audience around his own pinky. I suspect many a viewer will snicker, perhaps even guffaw, at the last two to three bizarre plot twists in Deep Water, but I would argue that the veteran director, working with a script by Sam Levinson and Zach Helm, knows perfectly well you’re laughing and is consciously playing along. And as was the case in Gone Girl, Affleck’s limited emotional palette serves him well; his Vic is a stolid, even passive endurer of indignities, which makes his rare flashes of temper all the more jarring.
A bigger problem is that de Armas’s Melinda is more a bundle of traits than a character. She is compulsively promiscuous, a mother who alternates between affection and cold indifference, and probably an alcoholic, but what is she seeking, from her husband or from the world, via all this acting out? I’ve long stood up for the femme fatale as a character type; some of the best characters in film (and theater) history could be said to fit that description, and it shouldn’t be impossible to be a committed feminist and also to thrill to the man-eating exploits of Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction or, hell, Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl (another murder mystery that gave Ben Affleck’s character the short end of the marital stick). But even a calculating heartbreaker motivated only by malice needs a scene or two to establish exactly what it is about the act of crushing men’s spirits that gets her off. De Armas is an uncannily magnetic actress; with her radiant skin and soft, almost babyish features, it’s easy to see why she would be cast as Marilyn Monroe. But the viewer must accept on faith that Melinda gets something out of the strange emotional economy she and Vic have established between themselves, without being given a clear sense of what that something is.
The images in Deep Water have a look familiar from Adrian Lyne movies of yore, with an upscale-catalog-ready gleam that will have you coveting the Van Allens’ scroll-armed sofa, if not their venomous marital spats. And if the conclusion the movie hurtles toward in the last ten breakneck minutes is narratively implausible, it is also—even more so than in the already dark Highsmith novel—bracingly misanthropic. But if there’s one recurring image that will stick with me from what is ultimately less an erotic thriller than an erotic black comedy, it’s those closeups of intertwining snails. Not since Laurence Olivier came on to Tony Curtis in Spartacus by inquiring about his young manservant’s taste for snails and oysters has the common mollusk so effectively symbolized the act of sexual congress. Affleck and de Armas’ offscreen relationship may not have survived past those idyllic early months of shared laughs and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, but thanks to the two of them, we’ll always have Deep Water.