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There’s a lot of pressure on Adrian Lyne ’s “Deep Water,” a film that was basically dumped onto Hulu after Disney bought Fox and had no tolerance for a movie about horny people. Some corners of the internet have been anticipating this project as a return to “movies for adults,” a genre that has undeniably gone away in the studio production line now that almost every movie has to get a PG-13. And the fact that it’s the first film in two decades from the director of “ Fatal Attraction ” and “9 ½ Weeks” sets a standard for the film that might lead to disappointment. Will the “Make Movies Sexy Again” crowd give some of the storytelling bumps in “Deep Water” a pass or is this going to be further proof that the subgenre is creatively dead? Early reviews have already been divisive, and there’s no denying that some of this feels like it’s been through editing hell, especially the final act. I’m eager to see a reportedly longer version because there’s a lot here that works, including a great Ben Affleck performance and the kind of sexual tension that Americans simply don’t offer in the 2020s.

Based on the 1957 novel by Patricia Highsmith , the genius who also wrote Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley , which should give you some idea of the games being played here, “Deep Water” doesn’t waste time with the “happy days” of the Van Allen union. We meet Vic Van Allen (Affleck) and his wife Melinda ( Ana de Armas ) deep in the misery of a failed partnership. They have stuck together, seemingly for their daughter Trixie ( Grace Jenkins ), but there seems to be little love that remains between the couple. The first extended scene takes place at a party, where Melinda gets very drunk and flirts with a handsome young man she personally invited to the soiree. In a moment alone together, Vic tells the new beau that he killed Melinda’s last lover, who's now missing. Is he kidding? The next day he claims that he is, but the basic machination of the script by Zach Helm (“ Stranger Than Fiction ”) and Sam Levinson (“ Euphoria ”) has been set in motion: Melinda cheats, and it’s possible that Vic kills the guys with whom Melinda cheats.

That’s certainly what Don Wilson ( Tracy Letts ) thinks is happening, and the fact that he drives the plot is a weakness that Helm & Levinson don’t really take enough time selling. Why is this man devoting so much time and capital to his theory that Vic is a murderer? Near the end, he says something about a book, which could be the only reason, but there’s also an interesting beat when Don meets Vic and they get a little heated over how Van Allen made his money—the kind of drone technology that’s used in warfare. Has Vic always seen human life as disposable? There’s a fascinating thematic undercurrent in “Deep Water” about two people who may seem very different but are both users—Melinda uses men for pleasure and to provoke her husband. She says at one point that she does so because of the way they make her feel. These are selfish creatures, two people who give into basic instincts in ways that most moral people repress.

Affleck nails this simmering selfishness perfectly, proving to be a great fit for the world of the writer who gave us Tom Ripley. There are echoes of Affleck's work in “ Gone Girl ” in how he captures Vic’s temperature, the way it rises every time he sees Melinda with a new lover, including ones played by Jacob Elordi and Finn Wittrock . Why doesn’t Vic just give up? The script, especially in its final act, hints at some darker themes that a longer version probably unpacks more but Affleck and De Armas sell this psychosexual dysfunction in a way that other performers would have missed. Lyne knows exactly how to use their physical beauty and sexual chemistry on-screen, reminding viewers how rarely we see this kind of thing between major movie stars. I’d also like to add that I thoroughly enjoy how often Lil Rel Howery keeps showing up lately and being so effective in relatively small parts (he delivers in two SXSW films this year too, “I Love My Dad” and “Spin Me Round”). He’s turning into a notable asset for those looking to fill a skeptical supporting role.

While I suspect the abrupt, choppy ending (with a ridiculous choice for the closing credits) will leave people angry, “Deep Water” had done enough before then to win me over. It’s really a vicious piece of work, a movie made by a filmmaker who is unafraid to see the primal, darker parts that beautiful people hide behind their gorgeous facades. It may not be the comeback that fans of Lyne’s were really hoping for, but it’s a reminder that this kind of movie can still get made today. Even if it may not be tomorrow.

On Hulu today.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film Credits

Deep Water (2022)

Rated R for sexual content, nudity, language and some violence.

115 minutes

Ben Affleck as Vic Van Allen

Ana de Armas as Melinda Van Allen

Tracy Letts as Don Wilson

Grace Jenkins as Trixie

Dash Mihok as Jonas Fernandez

Rachel Blanchard as Kristin Peterson

Kristen Connolly as Kelly Wilson

Jacob Elordi as Charlie De Lisle

Lil Rel Howery as Grant

Brendan Miller as Joel Dash

Jade Fernandez as Jen Fernandez

Finn Wittrock as Tony Cameron

• Adrian Lyne

Writer (based upon the novel by)

• Patricia Highsmith
• Sam Levinson

Cinematographer

• Eigil Bryld
• Andrew Mondshein
• Tim Squyres
• Marco Beltrami

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‘Deep Water’ Review: Love and Loathing in New Orleans

An unhappy husband raises suspicions when his wife’s lovers begin to disappear.

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

Two decades have passed since Adrian Lyne made “Unfaithful,” maybe his best film, though not his best known. (That would be his 1987 sizzler, “Fatal Attraction.” ) A slickly accomplished purveyor of the erotic thriller, Lyne doesn’t make love stories so much as lust stories — specifically, the way an incorrigible sexual appetite can rip a life apart.

On paper, then, he seems the perfect choice to direct “Deep Water,” an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1957 novel about a dangerously sick suburban marriage. Vic (Ben Affleck) is retired, enjoying his tech-derived fortune by mountain biking and raising snails. (Glistening gastropod close-ups suggest this hobby has some ominous narrative purpose; let me know if you find one.) Vic’s gorgeous wife, Melinda (Ana de Armas) — rarely seen without a glass in one hand and a lover in the other — favors little black dresses that shrug off as easily as her sobriety. Vic might be tortured by her flagrant infidelities, but how can you stay mad at a woman who gets topless just to wash the dishes?

Filmed in New Orleans and soaked in boozy parties where Melinda’s public humiliations of her husband earn the pity of Vic’s friends, “Deep Water” ( a French version was released in 1981) is a ridiculous murder mystery that could have worked much better as a study of sexual masochism. (The marriage has no heat, yet there’s sly relish in Melinda’s cruelty and a psychological puzzle in Vic’s pained stoicism.) Alternatively, had the story been set in the 1950s of Highsmith’s novel, when divorce was more stigmatized and alcohol the favored alternative, Vic’s forbearance — not to mention all those parties — might have made more sense.

As it is, Affleck is left with little to play but a sorry, perpetually glum cuckold. When the movie opens, a previous lover of Melinda’s has mysteriously disappeared. “I killed him,” Vic tells the dimwitted replacement (Brendan C. Miller), and we wonder if he’s capable of joking. And as Melinda’s flings — including a cheesy pianist who woos her by playing “The Lady Is a Tramp” — continue to vanish, a local writer (Tracy Letts) grows suspicious. Even Vic’s 6-year-old daughter (a delightful Grace Jenkins) looks at him askance.

None of this is ever less than preposterous. Though heaven knows I’m grateful for any grown-up movie these days, “Deep Water” is in many ways a baffling return for Lyne, whose advertiser’s eye for the allure of an image is repeatedly undercut by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson’s messy, often mystifying screenplay. Eigil Bryld’s caressing camera is fully up to any task his director sets him, but the movie appears chopped into misaligned chunks and dangling loose ends, its scenes spat out as randomly as bingo balls.

Originally intended for theatrical release, “Deep Water” has landed on Hulu , possibly because of nervousness over its themes. Yet there’s surprisingly little sex, and what there is has none of the vividness and tactility Lyne is known for. Like Vic’s snails, who must be starved before they can be consumed, “Deep Water” feels like a movie that’s had everything of interest well and truly sucked out.

Deep Water Rated R for bored fellatio and passionate murders. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on Hulu.

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Ben affleck and ana de armas in adrian lyne’s ‘deep water’: film review.

The director returns after a 20-year absence to the familiar territory of high-gloss adultery and its fallout in this Patricia Highsmith adaptation, premiering on Hulu.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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The primary usefulness of Deep Water is as a record for celebrity chroniclers of the off-camera romance that made co-stars Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas a tabloid thing for a minute, hopefully with better chemistry than they generate onscreen. But it does serve a secondary purpose for those of us who have ever considered the prodigious gifts of Tracy Letts as both playwright and actor, and wondered, “Is there anything he can’t do?” Well, turns out he can’t emerge unscathed from an Adrian Lyne erotic thriller, not that anyone does in this case.

Letts plays Don Wilson, a thinly sketched author of some sort, constantly side-eyeing his circle of well-heeled friends who go from one garden or pool party to the next in their leafy suburban New Orleans bubble. Don is supposedly looking to uncover dirt for a book he’s working on, but mostly his distasteful expression just says, “Who wrote this shit?” That’s until he gets tossed into a preposterous climax that seems to have lost some key foundational foreplay in the edit. Which may yield a third raison d’être for the movie should Letts and his wife, Carrie Coon, decide to give it a watch one night and enjoy a few cringing belly laughs.

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Release date : Friday, March 18 Cast : Ben Affleck, Ana de Armas, Tracy Letts, Lil Rey Howery, Dash Mihok, Finn Wittrock, Kristen Connolly, Jacob Elordi, Rachel Blanchard Director : Adrian Lyne Screenwriters : Zach Helm, Sam Levinson, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith

Lyne, once a prime purveyor of glossy titillation pulp like 9½ Weeks , Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal , has been absent since his comparatively classy 2002 entry, Unfaithful . Never a director to say no to a dangerous woman who’s a magnet for trouble, he tackles the 1957 Patricia Highsmith novel that was previously filmed in a 1981 French version titled Eaux Profondes , with Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant, and then adapted for German television two years later. Lyne’s take on the material, scripted without distinction by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson , manages to drain all the subtlety and psychological complexity from Highsmith’s story of marital warfare, transgression and obsession.

Erotic thrillers are hardly on-brand for Disney, which acquired the New Regency title in the Fox merger. So the film has been gathering dust since its originally scheduled November 2020 release date, shifting twice before eventually being bumped to Hulu for domestic and Amazon internationally. It’s ideal streaming fare since you can check your Twitter feed, do Wordle, go online shopping, hell, probably make a grilled cheese sandwich without much danger of getting left behind by the lethargic plotting.

Affleck plays brooding tech entrepreneur Vic Van Allen, who scowls a lot as he furiously cycles around town like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance , but mostly just looks bored or constipated. That applies even when he’s being humiliated by the flagrant extramarital forays of his wife, Melinda (de Armas), with a string of men, the younger and dumber the better. One of her recent flings, Malcolm McRae, has gone missing, and without even cracking a smile, Vic scares off her new plaything Joel (Brendan C. Miller) by claiming to have killed him.

McRae’s body eventually is discovered in the woods, and while Highsmith’s novel solved that crime and cleared Vic, the screenplay here — or maybe the desperate attempt to inject some suspense in the edit — keeps things murky. So for much of the sluggish two-hour running time you tell yourself, “No, it couldn’t be that obvious,” and then when you realize it is, you wait for a twist that doesn’t come.

Despite Vic’s emasculated pride, and the pitying camaraderie of his best buddies (Lil Rel Howery and Dash Mihok), he remains a pretty creepy guy. Which is not to say menacing. Having retired young after developing a chip used in drone warfare, he skulks around at home or spends time in a hothouse out back fingering the snails he breeds for visually symbolic purposes I don’t even want to contemplate. The clanging symbolism of Melinda chomping into a juicy red apple she just happens to have handy while taunting Vic in the car is at least less icky.

After Joel’s exit, Melinda moves on to a tall drink of water named Charlie De Lisle ( Jacob Elordi ), who plays piano in a cocktail bar, welcoming her to the establishment with “The Lady Is a Tramp.” She becomes more brazen at home, returning still drunk in the mornings from walks-of-no-shame, mocking Vic for being passionless and sneering, “If you were married to anyone else, you’d be so fucking bored you’d kill yourself.”

That should tell us something about Vic’s mysterious nature and the kinky interdependence of the couple, who evidently stick together to avoid a messy divorce. Given that the stigma attached to divorce in the late 1950s, when Highsmith wrote the novel, has long since waned, there must be some other magnetic force keeping them together. But the script doesn’t have the psychological savvy — even the curiosity — to locate it. The closest we get is the very Adrian Lyne notion that jealousy is a fierce turn-on. Not that Vic ever seems even mildly aroused. He’s barely awake.

Still, Charlie gets bumped out of the picture to be followed by the return of Tony Cameron ( Finn Wittrock ), a boyfriend from before Melinda was married. “Tony was the first American I fucked!” she exclaims with glee when he comes to the Van Allens’ house for dinner. Nice ice-breaker. Even before Tony goes missing, Melinda has begun actively accusing Vic of dispatching her conquests, and she’s teamed up with nosy Don to hire the most inept private detective in movie history. And yet, the cops scarcely show any interest in Vic.

A more probing director and writers might have made something of a wealthy white man barely rousing suspicion in the midst of a whole lot of dastardly deeds. But not here. The detective who does briefly question Vic (Jeff Pope) brings up the common knowledge that his wife has been sleeping around but just leaves it there without pursuing the matter further. The lack of coherent logic is as nagging as the complete absence of a sense of place, and despite composer Marco Beltrami’s hard-working strings, tension is also MIA.

While Lyne is the king of deluxe slut-shaming, the majority of the director’s films are better vehicles for his female stars than the men — Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction , Demi Moore in Indecent Proposal , Diane Lane in Unfaithful .

The same applies here to de Armas, who looks sensational in about a thousand variations on the little black dress or pantsuit — usually with a plunging neckline or backless — and has a sleepy sensuality that makes you believe she might be good casting as Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s eagerly anticipated Blonde .

But the emerging star was given more range to play in her 10 minutes onscreen in No Time to Die . We know nothing about Melinda’s past except that she has an accent and sings Paolo Conte at a party, so maybe she’s Italian? Her direction seems to consist mainly of “Look hot,” “Dance hot,” “Pout hot,” “Touch yourself.” All we really learn is that she’s a sexpot, to use a term as dated as the material, who needs to be desired by someone less wooden than Vic in order to feel alive.

There’s no question that Melinda is the most alive character in this moribund thriller, which makes it a drag that the perspective is entirely that of dull old Vic, the human snail.

Full credits

Distributor: Hulu Production companies: New Regency, Keep Your Head, Entertainment 360, Film Rites Cast: Ben Affleck, Ana de Armas, Tracy Letts, Lil Rey Howery, Dash Mihok, Finn Wittrock, Kristen Connolly, Jacob Elordi, Rachel Blanchard, Michael Braun, Jade Fernandez, Grace Jenkins, Brendan C. Miller, Devyn Tyler, Jeff Pope Director: Adrian Lyne Screenwriters: Zach Helm, Sam Levinson, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith Producers: Arnon Milchan, Guymon Casady, Benjamin Forkner, Anthony Katagas Executive producers: Yariv Milchan, Michael Schaeffer, Natalie Lehmann, Garrett Basch, Philipp Keel, Zev Foreman Director of photography: Eigil Bryld Production designer: Jeannine Oppewall Costume designer: Heidi Bivens Music: Marco Beltrami Editors: Tim Squyres, Andrew Mondshein Casting: Ellen Chenoweth

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Review: ‘Deep Water,’ an erotic thriller with Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, runs hot and cold

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Ben Affleck caresses a snail beautifully in “Deep Water.” As Vic Van Allen, the rich, brooding, slug-collecting antihero of this languid erotic thriller, he studies the little creatures as they slither around in his grasp and invites bewildered onlookers to share his fascination. “A snail will crawl up a 12-foot wall to find its mate,” he says admiringly, as if he were recognizing a kindred romantic. Sadly, Vic doesn’t go on to diagram their unique mating habits, which involve two sets of genitalia (most land slugs are hermaphrodites) and the shooting of a special “love dart” from one snail’s body into another. That sounds complicated and painful, if also mercifully devoid of emotional baggage. All in all, Vic prefers the company of snails to that of other humans — an attitude he surely shares with his late creator and fellow gastropod enthusiast, Patricia Highsmith.

A present-day adaptation of a 1957 Highsmith novel isn’t necessarily what you’d expect from Adrian Lyne, the 81-year-old English director who made his reputation with the adulterous thrills of “Fatal Attraction,” “Indecent Proposal” and “Unfaithful.” But while “Deep Water,” his first new feature in 20 years, looks at first like one of his patented hand-wringing, libido-tickling soap operas, it also has a chilled Highsmithian misanthropy that cuts differently than his previous work. If Lyne’s earlier potboilers asked (or glossed over) the question of why a husband or wife would stray from a happy marriage, “Deep Water” playfully ponders what might hold an unhappy one together: a child, sure, but also an open arrangement of a sort that was less common in Highsmith’s era than the present one, in which this updated movie takes place.

But even if they inhabit a more progressive-minded moment, Vic and his wife, Melinda (Ana de Armas), can’t help but raise eyebrows in their inner circle. An inveterate flirt, Melinda pushes the terms of their agreement to the limits: She spends her days chasing handsome young men around their leafy New Orleans suburb, sometimes inviting them over to the house for dinner. Vic, an early retiree, spends most of his time raising their sweet young daughter (Grace Jenkins), riding his mountain bike, tending his snails and watching Melinda’s revolving door of lovers with ever-darkening shades of contempt.

Part of the pleasure of “Deep Water” comes from watching him vent his scorn and undermine his rivals without losing his cool. Affleck, who once upon a time might’ve played one of those rivals, embraces the role of the quietly seething cuckold. Vic plays cruel mind games with one dreamy dullard (Brendan Miller), at one point calmly announcing that he killed one of Melinda’s previous lovers. (Is he lying? In that moment, at least, you’re not entirely sure.) He gets even crueler with a piano teacher (Jacob Elordi) whom he suspects of tickling more than Melinda’s ivories. At a certain point, we learn how Vic earned his millions, and we’re meant to both cackle and shudder: Like more than a few tech bros enjoying an early retirement, he doesn’t mind having a few corpses on his conscience.

There’s more to the story: a startling rumor, a couple of parties, a nosy neighbor (a typically sharp Tracy Letts), a few unfortunate “accidents” and a swimming pool that glows as ominously as the one in “La Piscine,” Jacques Deray’s 1969 classic of sex, deceit and murder. (Speaking of French thrillers: Highsmith’s novel was previously adapted into the 1981 film “Eaux Profondes,” starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Isabelle Huppert. A German TV adaptation, “Tiefe Wasser,” followed in 1983.) But while Lyne is a self-professed Francophile, the movies he seems to be referencing most blatantly here are his own. As shot by Eigil Bryld, this “Deep Water” is almost reassuringly shallow, a catalog of Architectural Digest furnishings and tasteful female nudity (wayward wife, meet antique bathtub). The slick sheen that has long clung to Lyne’s images, since his days as a director of TV commercials, hasn’t abandoned him over the last two decades.

Nor has he lost the interplay of seriousness and silliness — and the genial refusal to distinguish between the two — that has long animated his work. From time to time, the movie raises the intriguing possibility that the Van Allens’ marital dilemma — her unbridled lust, his thinly concealed jealousy — might be part of some kinky extended role play, as if Vic and Melinda were acting out their own (R-rated) cuckold-porn fantasy. Whatever sexual mind games are taking place, they get an extra frisson from the casting of Affleck and De Armas, who famously began dating midproduction in 2019 but broke things off in early 2021. More than a year later, the movie, which was made for theaters but delayed several times by the COVID-19 pandemic, is being dumped on Hulu with a conspicuous lack of fanfare.

It’s possible, while streaming “Deep Water,” to feel a stab of nostalgia for the big-screen heyday of the Hollywood erotic thriller, a genre to which Lyne and several others — the Lawrence Kasdan of “Body Heat” and the Paul Verhoeven of “Basic Instinct” among them — made indelibly sweaty contributions in the ’80s and ’90s. But the resemblance between Lyne’s latest and those earlier lurid entertainments turns out to be superficial at best. Affleck and De Armas don’t evince much in the way of onscreen chemistry, which I mean less as a dis to their now-defunct relationship than a compliment to their grasp of this particular assignment. Vic and Melinda’s fleeting sexual encounters — a little discreet fondling here, some behind-the-wheel fellatio there — are tinged with sadness and even hostility. Intimacy is achieved only in fits of rage.

There’s a lot of psychosexual layering to peel back here, in other words, or there would be if Lyne were more fully in control of his material. Slithering along as deliberately as one of Vic’s snails, “Deep Water” runs hot and cold; it’s sometimes a self-aware hoot and sometimes a disjointed drag. Even by the standards of comic relief, Vic and Melinda’s friends (played by actors including Dash Mihok and Lil Rel Howery) always seem to be wandering in from a more laid-back, more entertaining movie. Not-insignificant chunks of narrative seem to have gone missing, especially as the story barrels toward its startlingly abrupt finish. De Armas, the movie’s liveliest presence, is also perhaps the most ill-served by all this editing-room triage; she seems to be acting in fragments, as if she’d been directed to variously flirt, dance, drink, scream and slink around in black cocktail attire without pulling the pieces together.

Affleck fares better; viral gossip may have reduced him to a punchline, but time and circumstance have conspired to make him a more interesting actor than he often gets credit for being. Much as he showed in “Gone Girl,” another gleefully amoral potboiler about a loveless marriage, he excels at playing the emasculated dreamboat, the golden boy gone to seed. The resemblance to that earlier movie is instructive. Notably and refreshingly, Lyne largely seems to have purged himself of the moralistic streak that’s often marred his work; for the first time in a long time, he’s enjoying his characters’ awfulness rather than damning them for it. He doesn’t want to punish them. He just wants to hold them up to the light and watch them wriggle.

‘Deep Water’

Rated: R, for sexual content, nudity, language and some violence Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes Playing: Available March 18 on Hulu

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Deep Water review: Ana de Armas and Ben Affleck’s erotic thriller is stubbornly and knowingly unsexy

Adrian lyne’s comeback plays as if the simmering passions of his ‘fatal attraction’ and ‘unfaithful’ have been left out in the hot sun to curdle, article bookmarked.

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Dir: Adrian Lyne. Starring: Ben Affleck, Ana de Armas, Tracy Letts, Lil Rel Howery, Jacob Elordi, Dash Mihok, Finn Wittrock. 15, 115 minutes.

Celebrity couples possess a certain knack for portraying marriages in decline. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut . Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in By the Sea . Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? . The more rich and beautiful the pair, the more rotten the love they can portray on screen. I couldn’t possibly speculate on why: I’m a film critic, after all, not a psychotherapist. But whatever catharsis is to be found in the ritualistic enactment of one’s worst impulses, it’s in the very foundations of Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas ’s performances in the erotic (or not so erotic) thriller Deep Water .

Their off-screen relationship, kindled during production and snuffed out after one of the film’s many Covid-related delays, now survives entirely in subtext. It’s the coiled-up tension that already vibrated through the passages of Deep Water ’s source material, Patricia Highsmith’s compelling (and, again, not so erotic) 1957 novel of the same name – a story, primarily, about control, where an adulterous wife (Armas’s Melinda) is faced with the creeping possibility that her husband (Affleck’s Vic) is behind her last lover’s disappearance.

Affleck and Armas have delivered us a very ugly marriage indeed. Armas is the stand-out of the pair – her eyes flecked with provocation, a spider’s trap laid out with the sweetest of venom. Affleck, at times, is so weary that he acts a little zombified. But it works. What’s frightening about Vic is always how casually he talks, no matter how dark the subject or if his fingers are wrapped around a power drill. When Melinda and Vic act out love, it’s hollow and mechanical, with phrases like “I think you look beautiful in the dress you have on” stumbling out like they’re in a foreign tongue. When they insult each other, they take little nips at each other’s pride. She yells at him while she’s brushing her teeth, and the little flecks of toothpaste splatter onto his shirt like ejaculate. When in a mood, Vic retreats to his shed to fuss over his large collection of snails. He lets the mating creatures intertwine on his hand, leaving his skin slick with slime.

None of this sounds particularly erotic. Nor should it – despite how it’s been sold, Deep Water is stubbornly and knowingly unsexy, though it may seem against the very nature of its director, Adrian Lyne . This is his first film since 2002’s Unfaithful , which followed his previous erotic thrillers Indecent Proposal (1993) and Fatal Attraction (1987). It’s been somewhat unwisely framed, then, as the return of the genre, here to save us all from the sexless drought of modern Hollywood.

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But Lyne never anointed himself as the leader of any crusade, however noble. And his tone here is considered, if unexpected – as if the simmering passions of Fatal Attraction and Unfaithful had been left out in the hot sun to curdle. The sex scenes, a messy concoction of fumbled handjobs and feeble ass-grabbing, should be this harried because they are performed entirely without love.

Deep Water ’s script, overseen by Zach Helm and Euphoria ’s Sam Levinson, revises Highsmith’s final act. Male rage – the kind that flared up at the end of Fatal Attraction – is tampered down and replaced by a more even-handed power balance. It suits Lyne’s aims, allowing Deep Water to become a chess game with pawns made out of Melinda’s lovers, all eager young men with jawlines for days (played by Brendan C Miller, Jacob Elordi and Finn Wittrock). Melinda wants Vic to cheat. The competition enlivens her. Vic seems to view marriage as something akin to joint prison time. He thinks a little too much about his snails, too. If that sounds silly – well, yes, Deep Water never takes itself all that seriously.

Lyne can laugh at these people because he holds little respect for them, and there’s a general sense of revulsion directed here towards the rich and reckless. His camera navigates queasily through the film like he’s capturing a natural disaster in action. Deep Water is as erotic a thriller as you can get in a place so barren of love.

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Deep Water Reviews

“Deep Water” can be a bit shallow and silly at times. But the basic thrills and surprising laughs it provides are more than enough to make for an entertaining evening.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 9, 2023

After watching this film I am trying to comprehend how the two leads fell in love while filming.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

One of the most frustrating & Boring films that I have seen in awhile. Yes there is some entertainment to it… but it goes away so fast & the film is only saved by the performances.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

The protagonists couldn't be more awful people in an incredibly toxic relationship that's frustrating to watch, but their lack of development and inexistent arcs make the narrative feel repetitive, predictable, and lacking intensity.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Jul 25, 2023

Enticing and twisted, Deep Water sucks us into the journey with mesmerising lead performances and the prospect of an exciting climax, but unfortunately when the final destination is reached, it almost doesn't seem worth it.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 25, 2023

At the end of the day, it’s hard to call Deep Water disappointing. On the scale of the erotic thrillers that came before, it’s nothing memorable, but there is something admirable about its existence in 2022.

DEEP WATER is a well-made and enjoyable film. I laughed all the way through but it was mainly because of the direction of the story and where the sympathy for the characters lies.

Full Review | Dec 28, 2022

Deep Water has some very interesting ideas and some great performances from Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas but the story is very messy and convoluted at times. Times were it feels like the stacks are high and others where I questioned the point of the story

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/10 | Dec 26, 2022

It's surprisingly earnest in the film's tawdry convictions. Still, I can't quite recommend Deep Water as the movie gets in way over its head.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Dec 10, 2022

The result is an affair as dull and lifeless as one of the ex-lovers’ corpses floating in a river... if Indecent Proposal‘s Robert Redford walks up and offers you $1 million for one viewing of Deep Water, politely decline. It is simply not worth it.

Full Review | Nov 13, 2022

There is an alluring quality to its trashy story, and I loved the unexpected bites of pitch black humor which caught me off guard every time. But its lack of compelling twists (or really any twists whatsoever) zaps the movie of some needed energy.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 16, 2022

It’s all very slick, ideal for a 30-second cigarette advert, if people still made those.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jul 29, 2022

This film doesn't give the audience much in regards to context and having something for us to remotely root for. This was a slow burn that never really paid off.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jun 30, 2022

There's nothing remotely erotic about this movie. It felt like the actors were just tired throughout the making of this.

Lyne tries to make an ode to jealousy as an aphrodisiac, and perhaps that makes sense to him, an 81-year-old man who found a gold mine in that kind of cinema seen today as fatuous, outdated and toxic. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jun 10, 2022

The movie is weirdly coy with its sex scenes (in that there are almost none of them) and it feels like there are chunks missing throughout obscuring the satisfaction of the inevitable escalation to full thriller.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Jun 7, 2022

It's a very silly movie, but watchable in its blatant ludicrousness.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Jun 7, 2022

The biggest mystery is how this went so wrong, despite having all the right elements to succeed.

Full Review | May 23, 2022

Doesn’t even work as a guilty pleasure. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | May 16, 2022

Superficial thriller with limited range. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | May 16, 2022

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Deep Water review: An un-erotic non-thriller that's still kinda watchable

Ana de Armas and Ben Affleck torment each other in a tale of fatal attractions, indecent proposals, and aggressive biking.

Can a snail be sexy? How about a bridge? These and other questions may tickle your fancy when you watch Deep Water , a ridiculous but involving drama streaming on Hulu this Friday. Patricia Highsmith's original novel about a murderous marital crisis came out in 1957. That's 65 years of evolving relationship dynamics to grapple with. And the film marks the first directorial effort in two decades from Adrian Lyne, famous for making the kind of glossy erotic thrillers nobody even tries anymore. Leads Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas coupled and decoupled during the years of release delay, so Deep Water arrives a triple throwback: an old story in a dead genre starring exes. It's also a goof, with an odd charm wildly at odds with the leaden melodrama. This train wreck gawks at itself.

Affleck and de Armas play the unhappily married Van Allens. Vic got rich designing some kind of drone warfare computer chip, and now his job is something something web apps and something something publishing. Mostly, he bikes around and takes care of their precocious daughter, Trixie (Grace Jenkins). Melinda stays busy getting busy. Her affairs with various hot young dudes are not subtle. At a party full of close friends, she makes out with handsome doofus Joel (Brendan C. Miller), who compliments Vic for being such a chill cuckold. Vic calmly mentions another "friend" of Melinda's who recently disappeared — and strongly implies that he did the disappearing.

Is Vic killing Melinda's boyfriends? Everyone assumes his confession is a joke. Melinda thinks he's too boring for that kind of excitement. Unfortunately, I agree. Deep Water takes Vic's perspective even as it keeps his actions mysterious, and Affleck never locates the jealous pulse to power all the spiraling tension. Melinda's accelerating promiscuity should torment him, but it mainly exists as gossip for their social circle. That includes local writer Don Wilson ( Tracy Letts ), who takes an interest in the murder rumors. Vic's best friends, played by Lil Rel Howery and Dash Mihok, are mostly there to stare wide-eyed at Melinda's dalliances and offer grim husbandly condolences.

Lil Rel Howery! Now we're getting to the good stuff. Affleck's morose blankness makes it hard to understand why anyone would be pals with Vic, and Howery's role could just be the Black Best Friend cliché. But his low-key comic energy pulls the torpid romantic plot in a more self-aware direction. He seems like a regular person who just wandered into a softcore noir; his double takes are quadruple. You get a similar vibe from the close attention paid to young Trixie, who keeps asking their Alexa to play "Old MacDonald" yet seems to have complete who-cares awareness of all the bad things her parents are up to.

Meanwhile, de Armas does all the acting Affleck doesn't. It's a sing-on-the-piano, third-base-on-the-dance-floor kind of performance. Melinda is said to be foreign (de Armas is Cuban), which a couple of characters hilariously pinpoint as an explanation for her flagrant actions. "America's so suffocating!" she declares, after Vic begs her not to drunkenly disrobe in front of their horrified babysitter. She openly taunts her husband with her affairs; at one point, she banishes him to story time with Trixie, so she can screw her latest boy toy downstairs. "If you were married to anyone else," she tells him later, "You'd be so f---ing bored you'd kill yourself."

Despite her brassy assurance, Deep Water obeys the most normative rules its genre, with de Armas showing off more skin than any of her paramours. Still, it lacks the sizzle of Lyne's earlier films. Do we laugh more at sex scenes now? Or are these sex scenes just funny? (Prepare yourself for the biting.) The silliness may also come from adapting Highsmith's tale into modern times. Melinda is supposed to feel trapped by Vic, but that doesn't read anymore. She mainly comes off as a charming sex-positive polygamist, until the film worrisomely ponders if all she really wants is attention. So there's a frustrating lack of specificity in the central relationship, which sucks the air out of any one-on-one scene between the couple. We're miles from Unfaithful , where Diane Lane and Richard Gere gave stunner performances while embodying equivalent strains of carnal desperation and adulterous suspicion.

That 2002 film is Lyne's masterwork, embedding all his gaudy stimulations in rueful yearning. By comparison, Deep Water stays shallow. There's plenty to gape at if you want a weekend rubberneck, and some eccentric flourishes of genuine personality. Vic has pet snails — and gang, this man really cares about his snails. All of Melinda's boyfriends are cast, accidentally or on purpose, to look exactly half Affleck's age and size. The New Orleans setting means that every house has an aspirational deck, and that a boozy-stoned pool party gets broken up by a tropical shower. The final act requires everyone to suddenly become 63% stupider, though there are sublime pleasures in the late plot turns. (Without spoiling anything, I'll just say that someone brings a cute puppy to a murder.) Deep Water isn't really thrilling or erotic, but it accomplishes a kind of diagonal camp sincerity, plummeting its glamorous characters into ever-tawdrier situations. I wouldn't marry it, but I wouldn't kill it. Remind me, what's the third option? C+

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‘Deep Water’ Review: Ben Affleck Goes From Cuckold to Killer in Adrian Lyne’s Slick, Hard-to-Swallow Thriller

After a 20-year hiatus from the big screen, the 'Unfaithful' helmer returns with this steamy, if shallow Patricia Highsmith adaptation.

By Peter Debruge

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There’s something missing from Adrian Lyne ’s “ Deep Water ,” and it’s not just the body of Martin McRae, the last unfortunate rival to get a little too friendly with Vic Van Allen’s wife. Vic ( Ben Affleck ) and Melinda ( Ana de Armas ) have an open marriage, but her … distractions have a habit of disappearing, and so do pretty much all ties to recognizable human behavior in the “Fatal Attraction” director’s unexpectedly coolheaded adaptation of the 1957 Patricia Highsmith novel for Hulu. This erotic thriller is still sexy and plenty entertaining, mind you, but it’s just not very useful insofar as what it says about real relationships.

Late last century, Lyne had a long, successful run of portraying complex sexual dynamics through grown-up eyes, but it’s been 20 years since “Unfaithful” — he spent two decades fighting to get this film off the ground — and the now-octogenarian helmer’s influence on subsequent sizzlers has undermined his own capacity to shock. Films like “Gone Girl” and “Fifty Shades of Grey” are nothing if not knockoffs of the classic Lyne aesthetic (which treats sex more seriously than its softcore competition), pushing the envelope farther than the director is willing to go with this particular project.

In terms of material, Lyne’s sensibility would seem an ideal fit with Highsmith’s, given their shared preoccupation with jealousy and illicit desire. But it turns out the filmmaker lacks the “Talented Mr. Ripley” writer’s grounded sense of psychology, putting his emphasis instead on suspense — well, that and snails, which occupy a surprising amount of the movie’s attention (but more on that in a minute). Elegant as ever — to a fault — plot-centric Lyne seems more concerned with how things happen than why they do.

Popular on Variety

Much of this could have been solved rather simply, by including a conversation — or better yet, an argument — between Vic and Melinda in which the couple hash out the rules of their arrangement. They have what’s sometimes referred to as an “understanding.” The problem is, we don’t understand it. As Vic, Ben Affleck looks grizzled and angry for most of the film, glowering at Melinda from across the room at dinner parties as she brazenly flirts with other men. Most husbands would probably have a similar reaction. But most husbands don’t give their wives permission to consort with whomever they please, so long as they agree not to tear the family apart — which happens to be the deal in “Deep Water.”

Vic retired early, comfortably rich, and now serves as a house husband, taking care of their daughter (Grace Jenkins) while Melinda amuses herself on the town. Their evenings are a succession of parties at friends’ houses, at which she inevitably drinks too much and crosses the line. But where is the line? And what is Vic thinking when he catches Melinda making out with handsome idiot Joel (Brendan C. Miller) at one of these soirées?

He stares down from an upper window, catching her eye, and in this exchange, we are supposed to conclude … what? That he’s OK with it? That seeing her with another man turns him on? That Melinda is daring him to react? Maybe even all of the above. Affleck’s expression is unnervingly inscrutable, which could be the right answer in a certain context: People tend to be relatively poker-faced in real life. We could certainly debate whether it’s good acting or bad to telegraph a character’s internal reactions, and yet, in this context, audiences need some kind of clue to know how to read their relationship, and Affleck withholds that.

An early scene, which shows Vic and Melinda retiring to separate corners of the house, suggests the emotional distance that exists between the couple. After the party, Melinda denies him sex and sends him out of the room. But later, after Vic surprises her by dancing with another woman, it sparks a passionate lovemaking session. There’s an enticing puzzle aspect in trying to untangle the codes of their relationship. The trouble is, they’re not consistent, and what he says — to her, or to his friends (Dash Mihok and Lil Rel Howery, always good for a laugh), isn’t necessarily reflective of what he feels. Vic makes lofty claims of accepting her unconditionally — which sets up the movie’s unconvincing ending, different from the book’s (or that of “Eaux profondes,” the French adaptation from 1981, which starred Jean-Louis Trintignant and Isabelle Huppert). But unlike most functional open relationships, he can’t subsume his envy for the sake of her happiness.

Vic goes from cuckold to killer over the course of the film, and it’s not at all clear what flips the switch. In a private moment with Joel, Vic makes what he later describes as a joke, claiming to be responsible for Martin McRae’s disappearance. It’s his way of threatening this impertinent stud, of letting him know he’s not as “cool” with his wife’s playthings as she must claim, and it works. Joel backs off. But the story gets around, and new-to-town neighbor Don Wilson (Tracy Letts) even takes him at his word, going so far as to hire a private eye after another of Melinda’s “friends” turns up dead.

Lyne tantalizes us with the ambiguity of it all for a time, aligning the film’s POV with that of Vic, who retreats to the greenhouse out back to play with his snails whenever his feelings are hurt. Why snails? These hermaphroditic creatures must surely represent some kind of metaphor, too obscure to be easily interpreted. They also serve a more direct, sensual role: In “Gone Girl,” Affleck caught audiences off guard with a glimpse of frontal nudity in the shower. Here, the biggest shock is a scene in which he lets a few of these beloved gastropods slither up his arms.

Vic’s actions get increasingly unbelievable as the movie goes on, but Lyne’s a talented enough director to keep us invested, even in the lunatic last third. If anything, he doesn’t push things far enough. In other words, he’s still great at what he does; he just doesn’t do enough of it.

Reviewed online, March 11, 2022. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: TK MIN.

• Production: (U.S.-Australia) A Hulu release, presented in association with Regency Enterprises, Entertainment One of a New Regency, Keep Your Head, Entertainment 360, Film Rights production. Producers: Arnon Milchan, Guymon Casady, Benjamin Forkner, Anthony Katagas. Executive producers: Yariv Milchan, Michael Schaefer, Nathalie Lehmann, Garrett Basch, Philipp Keel, Zev Foreman.
• Crew: Director: Adrian Lyne. Screenplay: Zach Helm, Sam Levinson, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith. Camera: Eigil Bryld. Editors: Andrew Mondshein, Tim Squyres. Music: Marco Beltrami.
• With: Ben Affleck, Ana de Armas, Tracy Letts, Lil Rel Howery, Dash Mihok, Finn Wittrock, Kristen Connolly, Jacob Elordi, Rachel Blanchard, Michael Braun, Jade Fernandez, Grace Jenkins, Brendan C. Miller, Devyn Tyler, Jeff Pope.

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The Thriller Is Sexy Again in Ben Affleck’s Deep Water

The director Adrian Lyne’s first film in 20 years represents a comeback for the type of sultry, adult drama that used to pack theaters.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Ben Affleck, resplendent with stubble and weary eye bags, is a rich but bored husband with a beautiful (but also bored) wife, rattling around in a giant house wondering what to do with himself. Soon enough, a dead body appears. That’s the premise of Deep Water , a sultry new thriller starring Affleck and Ana de Armas as his wayward partner, but I could just as easily be describing Gone Girl , David Fincher’s superlative 2014 thriller about another Affleck-led relationship that goes sour. That tension is what the actor brings to the table these days: In any scene, you’re not sure whether you should kiss him or call the police.

Ever since the once–boyishly charming A-lister entered his 40s, he’s leaned into roles that emphasize a haunted past without sacrificing his marquee-friendly looks. Deep Water , directed by Adrian Lyne, is a healthy throwback to a previously dominant genre—the erotic drama. Lyne was once a master of the form, churning out hits such as Fatal Attraction , Indecent Proposal , and Unfaithful before seemingly retiring 20 years ago. His return plays to his strengths, stringing together tasteful sex and murder-mystery material to create a perfectly dependable two hours of grown-up fun.

Read: Ben Affleck gives the performance of his career

Because this is 2022, however, that grown-up fun has been relegated to a streaming service. ( Deep Water will debut on Hulu this Friday.) The film started shooting back in 2019, but its release was delayed time and again thanks to COVID; we’ve waited so long to see it, Affleck and de Armas even had an offscreen relationship that’s already run its course. Fox, Deep Water ’s original studio, has now been subsumed under Disney, and the family-friendly House of Mouse has decided to keep the adult story out of cinemas. (Disney has not commented on this decision.) That’s a sad fate for Deep Water , given that it represents a comeback for a type of movie that used to pack houses. ( Fatal Attraction was one of the biggest hits of 1987.)

Still, taking in all the steamy silliness from the comfort of your own home is enjoyable enough. In Deep Water , which is based on a 1957 Patricia Highsmith novel (itself a cited inspiration for Gone Girl ), Affleck plays Vic Van Allen, a retired microchip designer living in a fancy New Orleans mansion with his wife, Melinda (de Armas), and adorable daughter, Trixie (Grace Jenkins). Though the couple’s partnership is not without sexual spark, Melinda’s eye constantly wanders, and she fearlessly parades a series of men in front of her husband over the course of the film, canoodling with them at parties under his nose. Early in the movie, Vic takes Melinda’s latest squeeze aside and hints that he might have had a hand in the disappearance of her last supposed lover.

Is the comment a bit of jealous braggadocio, or is Vic actually a cold-blooded killer? That’s the keep-you-guessing appeal of Deep Water , which sees Vic and Melinda’s relationship vacillate between tenderness and simmering rage. In Highsmith’s novel, their marriage has entirely desiccated; Vic merely tolerates Melinda’s transgressions as long as she doesn’t ask for a messy divorce. But this update, written by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson, is a lot less clear on how officially “open” the couple are, and whether Melinda’s affairs are an attempt to catch her husband’s attention or push him away.

Affleck is therefore well cast; he can play Vic as a piece of dead weight while still winking at the movie-star magnetism that lurks underneath, teasing it out as the story develops. The role is far darker (and pulpier) than the one he played in the inspirational drama The Way Back , but whereas in that film he portrayed an alcoholic rediscovering his love of basketball, here his character’s true passion leads to a lot of suspicious disappearances. Once Vic makes his veiled threat to Melinda’s boy toy, he starts upping the menacing behavior around each subsequent lover (played by Jacob Elordi and Finn Wittrock, among others).

De Armas is one of the most exciting young stars around right now— her Knives Out performance was revelatory , and she was the best thing about No Time to Die last year. But she gets the short stick here, mostly glowering in the background as Melinda ponders whether Vic has turned as villainous as he’s intimating. Their scenes together have genuine sizzle, something many a modern Hollywood romance lacks. But Deep Water could use a little more shading for its female lead, especially some further explanation of just how her relationship with Vic deteriorated. Instead, audiences are served up multiple moments of Vic communing with snails, which he keeps as pets (a reference to Highsmith herself, who apparently once pulled gastropods out of her handbag at a dinner party).

Even in good whodunits, the setup is typically way more exciting than the payoff: For example, the first two-thirds of Unfaithful , Lyne’s previous film, are alluring and skillfully performed, while the final act feels more perfunctory. In Deep Water , viewers will have much more fun guessing at how dangerous Vic and Melinda’s cat-and-mouse game is going to get than watching the results unfold. Characters start making mistakes, the body count reaches implausible levels, and practical questions of just who is keeping an eye on Vic and Melinda’s daughter during all this mayhem start to overwhelm the narrative. But Deep Water is still a robust, well-acted thriller that lands most of its major twists gracefully; for that, all lesser sins can be forgiven.

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Deep Water is a movie for the mean and horny

Deep Water asks the deep moral question: Can a drone engineer be sexy?

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Passed down from generation to generation is a piece of wisdom that functions both as advice and warning: Do not stick your dick in crazy. Though this saying is firmly entrenched among bro culture, it applies to receptive partners, too. Complications of ableist language aside, not engaging in sexual relations with people whose worldview you find to be incompatible with your own has likely averted innumerable personal disasters.

But if no one is having sex with “crazy,” it creates a forbidden unknown, an unanswerable question of what lies beyond the horizon of sanity. What happens on the off-chance you do it anyway? Further, what if you actually enjoy it? Or what if you’re the “crazy” in question?

Enter: Deep Water .

Directed by Adrian Lyne and starring Ana de Armas and Ben Affleck, Deep Water is an erotic thriller whose sole existence is to seemingly answer all these questions through the power of a saucy, melodramatic cinematic adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel. The two real-life exes play a married couple who are equally hot and hateful, and spend a lot of time torturing each other and their New Orleans neighbors. Sparring around their precocious child, they insult each other with lascivious sighs and purrs that sound like threats.

Also there’s some light murder. I guess there’s water involved, too, though it is mostly in the form of drinking and is only occasionally deep.

For the most part, though, Deep Water has abandoned thought and logic for horny, unhinged vibes. It’s so much beautiful fun.

Deep Water will make you believe there’s someone out there for everyone. Hopefully your soul mate enjoys Deep Water.

The film drops its audience right in the middle of an odd domestic arrangement. Vic (Affleck) is a man who invented a microchip that’s integral to drone warfare; he’s become rich off of drone murders. He’s married to Melinda (de Armas), a terminally amorous woman who seemingly hates Vic. That’s not because she’s an ethical pacifist or concerned about the American government’s history of “accidental” civilian casualties, but because Vic is nice and boring.

How could a man who taught sky robots to murder better be boring, Melinda wonders constantly. How could a woman so randy be so mean, Vic wonders back. Divorce is an option neither one gives much mind to.

There’s no explanation of how these two found each other (College? A hotel bar? Hinge?) though the relationship is clearly off, thus creating a movie experience uncannily similar to sitting at a table next to a date that’s gone sideways. You pretend not to notice. You make eye contact with your own date. You both eavesdrop, but all you get are answers to questions that you still have to figure out yourself.

Vic and Mel have worked out a shaky arrangement in which Melinda is allowed to have side affairs with younger, ostensibly more exciting young men. (Melinda has forged a side deal with a faceless god who allows a steady trickle of very good-looking twunks into her life.) I’m not really sure what is in it for Vic, but the aerial death merchant seems to enjoy Melinda’s existence in his house. This setup eventually goes sour as Melinda escalates her affairs, hoping to get reactions out of Vic, and Vic gets angrier about how embarrassing those affairs are.

De Armas’s performance is dripping in hiss and slink. She breaks every word down to the syllable, then twists them in a way that seems both incredibly arousing and forbidding. She whispers alarm into phrases like “lobster bisque” and “mac and cheese” in a way that will now haunt me anytime I look at a New American menu.

Opposite de Armas, Affleck reprises Nick Dunne, the dense, airless husband he played in 2014’s Gone Girl. In that spectacular film, Nick, like Vic, also had a sociopathic wife who hated him. But her resentment was spurred on by Nick’s lack of ambition; he peaked too early in life. There’s much more menace and much less opacity with Vic, who presents as more of a loser than Nick ever did. Though Vic and Nick’s brow furrows and sighs come from the same Affleck, Vic’s originate from frustrated exasperation while Nick’s are more idiocy. Affleck is a guru of calibrating and finding the difference between.

Affleck and de Armas’s performances, bolstered with murders (plural!), twunks, snails (Vic has a snail garden), jazz, and unhinged bouts of resentful fellatio have created one of my favorite movies in recent memory. I can’t think of a sillier, sexier time on film. Deep Water is the movie you’ll want to text your friends about, and then invite them over to watch again, together, so you can witness their reactions when, say, de Armas pantomimes plucking one of Affleck’s stray pubic hairs out of her teeth.

Deep Water also functions as a cherished reminder of the infamous Affleck/de Armas real-life relationship , trapped eternally in amber. Both have since moved on — she’s playing Marilyn Monroe , and he reignited the couple known as Bennifer — but the psychosexual thriller was supposedly so powerful that it sparked a romance.

The two reportedly fell for each other when Deep Wate r was filmed in fall of 2019. They became a visible couple in March 2020, right before the pandemic shut down all social life in the US. Perhaps because of the lack of anyone doing anything and de Armas’s newfound stardom ( Knives Ou t was released in the fall of 2019), photographers spent a lot of time tracking Affleck and de Armas’s activities together. They took walks, drank Dunkin’ coffee together, took more walks, drank more coffee. They officially became the “It” couple of the pandemic quarantine. Their eventual breakup reinforced Affleck’s relatable everyman status, as he began to consume more coffee and order things off Amazon . In the same period, de Armas famously blocked the Ana de Armas Updates stan Twitter account that fervently supported the starlet.

What a fun and honestly embarrassing moment in time for anyone terminally online! Which many of us were, in those early pandemic days.

It was a time many things were taken from us — and for a brief stretch, it looked like we might not get this movie. It was delayed multiple times and then taken off the release schedule. It’s gone straight to Hulu, but it’s survived. We may never know how close we were to losing Deep Water forever! And thankfully, we never will.

Deep Water is currently streaming on Hulu.

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How Much You Love  Deep Water  Depends on How Much You Miss Erotic Thrillers

In my case, the answer is “a lot.”.

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.

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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 .

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Movie Reviews

'deep water' could have been artful or fun — but instead, it's just mechanical.

Linda Holmes

Melinda (Ana de Armas) and Vic (Ben Affleck) Claire Folger/ Courtesy of 20th Century Studio hide caption

Melinda (Ana de Armas) and Vic (Ben Affleck)

The word "trash" is a complicated one.

Pauline Kael wrote the essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies" in 1969. In it, she argued that many — that most — movies are not art. They are entertaining or not, they are pleasurable or not, they are satisfying or not, but most lack the level of technique that makes technique worth talking about, and thus, they are not art. She says that after all, people who are considering seeing a movie ask the question "What's it about?" or "Who's in it?", rather than the question "How [well] is it made?" But lack of technique doesn't necessarily make the movie bad, she argues. It's perfectly valid to like a movie, even while understanding it is not an artfully made movie. As such, Kael refers broadly to (at least some) movies that are not art as "trash," whether they are good or not. The term "trash" is not exactly derogatory, even though it is certainly dismissive of, specifically, the idea of treating trash as art.

So let's talk about Deep Water .

Deep Water is based on a Patricia Highsmith novel of the same name, although the liberties it takes with Highsmith's plot, characterizations, and themes are considerable. In the film, Vic (Ben Affleck) is married to Melinda (Ana de Armas), and they have a little daughter. Melinda has boyfriends on the side, a habit Vic knows about, and she knows he knows, and they talk about it pretty openly. This doesn't seem to be consensual nonmonogamy in the movie, or a kink they both enjoy; it's a situation that they both seem unhappy in, and it's not clear how they got here. (With that said, perhaps being miserable is their kink. I don't judge.)

The film comes from Adrian Lyne, who directed Flashdance in 1983 and then became sort of a king of semi-scandalous sex movies, including Fatal Attraction , Indecent Proposal , Unfaithful , and — probably most famously when it comes to sexual content — 9 1/2 Weeks . These movies were a fascinating example of the blurry lines between trash and art: Fatal Attraction is a sensational thriller that pushes an awful lot of pretty familiar exploitation buttons but managed to be nominated for best picture. And Deep Water is right up Lyne's alley: a story about the mixing of sex and violence, and particularly the explosive psychic dangers of extramarital affairs.

The writing pedigree here is peculiar: Lyne is working with screenwriters Sam Levinson, who created Euphoria , and Zach Helm, who wrote Stranger Than Fiction and Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium . That is, you might say, a lot.

Notably, Highsmith's explanation of the nature of Vic and Melinda's marriage is not the same as what you get from the movie. In the book, Vic sort of fancies himself a modern man, too sophisticated to be anything as petty as jealous or possessive: "One of Vic's firmest principles was that everybody—therefore, a wife—should be allowed to do as she pleased, provided no one else was hurt and that she fulfilled her main responsibilities, which were to manage a household and to take care of her offspring."

But in the movie, Vic doesn't seem to enjoy anything about his marriage; he glowers at Melinda at the (many) parties they attend as she openly dances and flirts with other men, and he stews as she comes home late over and over from various assignations. There certainly doesn't seem to be any expectation on his part that she participate in a traditional household. Admittedly, it can be hard to tell the difference between glowering angrily and glowering lustily, and I have already seen critical responses to this film that read Vic as more turned on by Melinda's affairs than I did. Is he grim or is he horny? That is the question.

The story kicks in when we learn that one of Melinda's past boyfriends has disappeared, and then something bad happens to another one of them, and the central question of the movie becomes: Did Vic have something to do with what happened to these guys? (Melinda immediately believes he did, which is another sign that perhaps this is not a consensually open marriage but something more troubled.)

From here, you get a lot of Ben Affleck wearing one expression. Even in the trailer , there is shot after shot of the same face of flat loathing. He's certainly presented as a potentially menacing figure in both the trailer and the movie, but what's missing is the specificity and the transformation of, say, Matt Damon's pale, awkward, grasping Tom turning inevitably monstrous in the Highsmith adaptation The Talented Mr. Ripley . Affleck here is just "angry jealous husband," largely the same at the beginning and the end, which is considerably less satisfying.

But it raises an interesting question that a lot of self-consciously steamy movies have raised before it: Is this good, even if it's not artful?

My conclusion is that it is competent , that Lyne certainly knows how to create the particular state of sweaty and potentially destructive lust that has become his signature. But it was hard for me to close the distance between myself and this movie, to get into it, simply because it felt ... mechanical. The seams show.

But there are times when Deep Water approaches another kind of success, which is the status of really good trash. This is particularly so in a sequence in which the great Tracy Letts, playing a local buttinsky, winds up as one of two characters in a chase scene on a mountain. You will see the extraordinarily unlikely, superhero-level, Fast-and-Furious -level feat of timing that is about to happen at the climax of this chase, and you will see that Letts is chewing, chewing, chewing the pretty mountain scenery to play it up. The guy knows what he's doing; he's over the top on purpose. He is participating in good trash.

There is also a strain of good trash in the fact that Vic — in a character flourish that is in the book — spends a lot of time out in a little shed communing with his collection of snails. The main purpose of the snail scenes seems to be that extreme close-ups of snails make them look kind of ... mucosal? And writhing? Which is sensual? All these question marks are to say that the snails almost seem to turn Vic on, which is a good-trash detail if ever there was one.

It's too simple to say this movie falls victim to being "no script, just vibes," but it's a little bit true. What's unmistakable here is the incredibly Lyne-ian mood , that '90s sense of the "seems to contain more sex than it actually does" picture. The Overton Sex Window has shifted considerably since Fatal Attraction , particularly given how much sex you can watch on self-consciously classy television, so there's something about the gauzy "fog of sex" tone they're going for here that's almost nostalgic. Erotic thrillers have a long and honorable history ( Fatal Attraction was part of the Michael Douglas drop-your-pants-and-run-for-your-life trilogy that also included Basic Instinct and Disclosure ), and long may they ... wave.

Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

Movie Review – Deep Water (2022)

March 20, 2022 by Robert Kojder

Deep Water , 2022.

Directed by Adrian Lyne. Starring Ben Affleck, Ana de Armas, Tracy Letts, Rachel Blanchard, Dash Mihok, Lil Rel Howery, Jacob Elordi, Finn Wittrock, Kristen Connolly, Jade Fernandez, Damon Lipari, Michael Braun, Brendan Miller, Jaren Mitchell, Devyn A. Tyler, Jeff Pope, Paul Teal, and Michael Scialabba.

A well-to-do husband who allows his wife to have affairs in order to avoid a divorce becomes a prime suspect in the disappearance of her lovers.

Director Adrian Lyne essentially coming out of retirement (his last feature was 20 years ago) to adapt a Patricia Highsmith novel sounds like a match made in the lust circle of hell. Individually, they are responsible for some of the most renowned erotic thriller works for their respective mediums, whether it be Lyne’s Fatal Attraction or Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (which was also brilliantly adapted starring Matt Damon in what is arguably still the best performance of his career), so even with an extended hiatus following a lackluster outing, there is plenty reason to be excited and feel that Deep Water could be the thrust in the ass that a largely sexless Hollywood cinematic landscape needs.

Somehow, it is somewhat of a disappointment in the sexual sizzle department, but there’s more than enough nefariously manipulative psychology going on in the minds of both of its immensely unlikable leads to remain invested. It’s also hard to place the blame on stars Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas (who ended up becoming a real-life couple for a brief stint) given that the script from Zach Helm and Euphoria ‘s Sam Levinson is at least 70% notes on how they should stare at one another with jealousy and inner pain.

Ben Affleck is tech genius Vic Van Allen, who also specializes in photography and an assortment of hobbies that are usually useful for stalking his wife Melinda (Ana de Armas). At first glance, Vic appears to be a chill husband that is comfortable with Melinda casually making out with other guy friends. He seems to allow her to have some level of polyamorous freedom, although it’s more because he has lost his passion for the marriage and only wants to stay together for their daughter. Even Vic’s friend (Lil Rel Howery) initially seems to be the troublemaker, encouraging him to reel Melinda in on behalf of her lustful behavior.

However, the sociopathic and narcissistic energy radiating from their characters offset this. I spent most of Deep Water hoping each one of them would fuck other characters to piss each other off more and that at some point, the child they mostly neglect and leave to a babysitter would get taken away.

Underneath that, Vic is a low-key psychopath that opportunistically chooses his moments to strike fear in Melinda’s friends by claiming to have murdered someone she was seeing when they were together. It doesn’t matter whether people believe him or not; it’s enough to make them cut contact with Melinda entirely and sometimes even flee the rural town. Sometimes this jealousy and unhinged behavior pull them back together for some short-lived intimacy, but for the most part, Melinda goes out and finds another guy to befriend.

As such, it’s like watching a twisted game of love/hate where the genuine fascination simply comes from how these characters/performers react to one another. At times, it feels like something Melinda enjoys not necessarily because it’s healthy, but because it’s the only way Vic shows some passion about being together. To their credit, Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas do have magnetizing toxic chemistry with one another.

Considering the revolving door situation of supporting characters, Deep Water consistently introduces new and familiar faces, typically with the unique skill set to quickly administer some personality before being kicked right back out of the narrative. Sometimes this can have a negative effect in that plenty of events are barreled right over and moved on from so that Vic and Melinda can get back to toying and trying to outsmart one another. However, the story remains grounded in the highly discomforting psyche of its central couple.

Melinda is not a saint and makes some troubling decisions, but what’s genuinely terrifying here is Vic’s public mask presenting himself to his friends as someone that encourages his wife to have romantic and sexual freedom, when he secretly has a disturbing amount of control issues. Wrapped up in all of this is a mystery novelist friend (Tracy Letts), who suspects that Vic is a dangerous person. And there is a sense of dangerous unpredictability within Ben Affleck’s performance as if he could violently snap at any moment.

Even as Deep Water shifts further into mystery territory itself, the narrative remains tethered to realism, by extension, keeping us on edge throughout. There’s always a curiosity of how any of what transpires will change the dynamic of their marriage or if it will at all.

Deep Water is a solid comeback for Adrian Lyne, even if the sexual energy it requires does feel slightly restrained, and the plot keeps moving forward beyond new developments as soon as they are brought up. It does at least build to a scorcher of an ending, culminating in a breathtaking chase sequence. Success mostly hangs on Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas believably psychologically going to war with one another, which they do with numerous stares and heated body language.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★  / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check  here  for new reviews, follow my  Twitter  or  Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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Common sense media reviewers.

Sex, drinking, language in ridiculous erotic thriller.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Poor/criminal behavior, from infidelity to murder,

The two main characters, despite being seemingly d

Lil Rel Howery appears as a "best friend" in a few

Person's head is bashed, with lots of oozing blood

A character has many different sexual partners. Wo

Strong language, with many uses of "f--k." Also "s

A main character is frequently drunk, although no

Parents need to know that Deep Water , based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, is an erotic thriller directed by Adrian Lyne and starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas. Several sex scenes are shown, some of them rough, with thrusting and moaning. A woman is seen topless, characters kiss, and there's sex-related…

Positive Messages

Poor/criminal behavior, from infidelity to murder, has no consequences.

Positive Role Models

The two main characters, despite being seemingly decent parents to their daughter, are flat-out terrible people who get away with terrible behavior and choices, including cheating and murder.

Diverse Representations

Lil Rel Howery appears as a "best friend" in a few party scenes, but this story is largely focused on White, privileged males. Story is centered on a couple but is definitely told from male point of view.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Person's head is bashed, with lots of oozing blood. Rock hurled at someone's head; more blood. Weighing down corpse with rocks to sink it in water. Character falls down hill. Dead body floats in pool. Body accidentally dropped on concrete. Man strikes woman in the face. Shouting, arguing.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A character has many different sexual partners. Woman shown topless. Rough sex, with thrusting and moaning. Kissing. One character kisses another's bottom. Character lowers head to another's lap in a car, bites. A woman pulls up her skirt, touches herself, holds her fingers to another character's nose. Strong flirting. Reference to "cleavage" in party dress. Strong sex-related dialogue.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language, with many uses of "f--k." Also "s--t," "motherf----r," "a--hole," "cum," "dumbass," "slut." "Jesus Christ" used as an exclamation.

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Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A main character is frequently drunk, although no alcohol dependency is suggested. Many parties with social drinking. Cigarette smoking. Pot smoking; characters are said to be "high." Father shares wine with young daughter.

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Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Deep Water , based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, is an erotic thriller directed by Adrian Lyne and starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas . Several sex scenes are shown, some of them rough, with thrusting and moaning. A woman is seen topless, characters kiss, and there's sex-related dialogue and other explicit moments. Violence includes scenes of killing, oozing blood, dead bodies, a woman being slapped in the face by a man, shouting, and arguing. "F--k" is used frequently, as are "s--t," "motherf----r," "a--hole," "goddamn," etc. One of the main characters is frequently drunk, with no consequences. Social drinking, cigarette smoking, and pot smoking are also shown, and a father lets his young daughter have a sip of wine. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

In DEEP WATER, Vic Van Allen ( Ben Affleck ) is a self-made millionaire who invented a computer chip that helps drones find their targets. He's married to the beautiful Melinda ( Ana de Armas ), who enjoys drinking and throwing herself at various other men. Vic coolly tells one of her conquests that he, Vic, murdered one of her previous boyfriends. At a party, Melinda flirts with pianist Charlie De Lisle ( Jacob Elordi ). It starts to rain, and everyone goes inside, but Charlie is found in the pool, drowned. It's not long before Melinda becomes interested in another man, an ex-boyfriend with whom she recently reconnected. Vic murders him in cold blood and ditches the body in a gorge. But this time, he may have been too sloppy.

Is It Any Good?

A cheesy erotic thriller from a veteran of the genre, based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, may sound like movie gold, but the end result is eye-rollingly ridiculous. Adrian Lyne , the octogenarian director of Fatal Attraction , Indecent Proposal , and Unfaithful , returns after a 20-year gap with Deep Water . It begins well, setting up a simmering tension between Affleck and de Armas, both of whom seem committed to their roles; Affleck is chillingly stoic, while de Armas is recklessly sensual. But things quickly fall apart as we realize that this couple seems to do nothing except go to parties every night with the same people.

Not to mention that, no matter how broken up Melinda may seem over the loss of her most recent conquest, she immediately starts pursuing a new one. There's no sense of time passing between events or of anything building; everything seems reset at the beginning of every sequence. This is marked by Affleck's magical movie beard, which remains exactly the same length in every scene. Moreover, attempts to build symbolism around Vic's collection of live snails (?) and his daughter's love of "Old McDonald Had a Farm" simply hit a wall, and Deep Water starts to feel shallower and shallower as it heads toward its gloomy, pathetic conclusion.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Deep Water 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

How does the movie depict sex ? What values are shown?

How are alcohol, smoking, and drugs portrayed? Are they glamorized? Are there consequences? Why is that important?

If you've read it, how does the movie compare to Patricia Highsmith's book? How does it compare to other movie adaptations of her books?

What's appealing about the erotic thriller genre? What qualities go into a good one?

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : March 18, 2022
• Cast : Ben Affleck , Ana de Armas , Tracy Letts
• Director : Adrian Lyne
• Inclusion Information : Latino actors
• Studio : Hulu
• Genre : Thriller
• Topics : Book Characters
• Run time : 115 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : sexual content, nudity, language and some violence
• Last updated : April 15, 2024

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