“Deep Water” - Film Review
Unhappily married couple Vic (Ben Affleck) and Melinda (Ana de Armas) are living well in New Orleans. As a condition of their marriage, and in an effort to avoid the unpleasantness of divorce, Melinda is able to have extramarital affairs. At first Vic is okay with her infidelity, but as she becomes more outwardly brazen with the men she’s seeing, Vic’s anger and resentment grow.
Director Adrian Lyne’s return to the erotic thriller genre that made him famous is shockingly lackluster. Whether it’s Affleck’s stiff performance or the comical script from Sam Levinson and Zach Helm, Deep Water doesn’t quite work. It’s unclear what type of movie the filmmakers were interested in making, and Deep Water is lopsided. Affleck plays a character who is similar to his role in David Fincher’s Gone Girl, a smarmy husband who thinks he’s much smarter than his wife. Not much good can be said about Affleck’s performance. It’s rigid and uninteresting, and makes it hard for the audience to blame his wife for having extra marital affairs. de Armas, on the other hand, is electric, pulling the focus in every scene she’s in. Instead of giving her character any depth, the script reduces her importance to only the relationships she has with the men in her life. Whether that be her husband or her lovers, Melinda exists mainly as a pawn to give Vic motivation.
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The film feels like it was a forgotten script plucked from the erotic thriller heyday of the ’80s, and there is something to be said about the forgettable chaos of that genre of film. Unfortunately, despite Affleck and de Armas’ real-life romantic relationship, there are no fireworks between the two on camera. Even calling it a thriller is a bit of a stretch, as the movie’s most tense moment is a chase scene between a bike and a car.
At the end of the day, it’s hard to call Deep Water disappointing. It seems unlikely that anyone is going into the film expecting to be blown away by the acting, the script, or the direction. On the scale of the erotic thrillers that came before, it’s nothing memorable, but there is something admirable about its existence in 2022.
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