Deep Water review – an old-school erotic thriller, for better or worse

No American erotic thriller has received generally positive critical praise in the last twenty years. This is no coincidence; contemporary efforts tend to translate as embarrassing, with sex in general becoming ever absent from progressively puritanical mainstream cinema. So when it was announced that Adrian Lyne – the very man who catapulted the genre into the mainstream with 1987’s Fatal Attraction – was returning after a twenty-year absence to direct two Hollywood stars in a story of sex, mind games and murder, morbid curiosity inevitably gave way to the notion that of course, of course, this would be a failure. The mere fact that it isn’t is something to celebrate.

A yuppies-in-peril erotic thriller in the ilk of Consenting Adults and Dream Lover, Deep Water is adapted from the novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith (has anyone else’s oeuvre been so successfully translated to celluloid?) and told from the point of view of Vic (Ben Affleck). He’s a world-weary man of few words, now content to raise his daughter having made his millions inventing a morally questionable drone microchip. He also, with an air of indifference, gives a free pass to his wife Melinda (Ana de Armas), who takes pleasure in sexually humiliating him with her numerous lovers. When one of her conquests ends up dead, Vic matter-of-factly tells people he killed him, to their puzzled shock — and it’s not until more of her lovers begin to meet their untimely end that we truly begin to wonder if he’s a sicko, or just a man with a sick sense of humour.

Many who go into the film will know that Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas fell in love (lust?) on set, resulting in a much-publicized romance that didn’t last the length of lockdown (Bennifer 2.0 is happening now, keep up). Going in with this knowledge feels like a pleasing secret after the fact: the equivalent of watching Eyes Wide Shut’s scenes of sexual dislocation knowing that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were about to divorce, a sort of unwanted tabloid interference lurking in your subconscious.

Beyond our central couple, the supporting cast feel largely irrelevant – Tracy Letts in particular is saddled with a thankless role — and so the best scenes are those in which Armas and Affleck parry over acerbic eye contact and heady hatred, the atmosphere electric with chemistry. This isn’t the sort of film where the response is to shout “get therapy!” or “get a divorce!” – even while Melinda is flagrantly having sex with multiple other men, she seems to hold a morbid respect for the lengths her husband will go to assert his power, no matter how brazen.

Wherein lies the film’s appeal: Lyne takes what many consider a démodé genre and manages to probe the murky psychology of marriage and sex in a way that doesn’t feel obsolete or skin-deep. Through an oddly tempered atmosphere, he unpicks what happens to a couple who are so proud of being “modern” that they somehow circle back to their most irrational and primal instincts. For better or worse, he doesn’t try to overhaul the erotic thriller for the contemporary mindset – this is an unapologetically overwrought slice of horned-up perversion translated as a morality lesson. It’s all you could want from a veteran purveyor of filth.

Ben Affleck is far more interesting an actor than people give him credit for. As Nick Dunne in Gone Girl, he proved his ability to be playful with his public persona, inhabiting a modernised version of the role Michael Douglas played in many an erotic thriller: the dumb guy messed around by a woman he underestimated. As Vic, however, he bypasses this stock character to channel a more insidious energy that keeps your eyebrow permanently raised. He is, as one character correctly assesses, “a weird guy”: an insular nerd who builds microchips, keeps pet snails and still makes his wife freshly squeezed juice the morning after she’s been screwing a man half his age. If Nick was the hapless philanderer who deserved what he got, Vic’s the weird guy who manages to bring conversations to an awkward halt every time he opens his mouth.

But it’s Ana de Armas, somehow even more dazzling than her scene-stealing turn in No Time To Die, who emerges as the most impressive thing in Deep Water. With her taunting gaze, she’s born to play a femme fatale, and, crucially for the plot, she’s convincingly the kind of person you would be willing to risk death to sleep with. As Vic voluntarily cuckolds himself so she may sleep her way through their group of friends, we never get the feeling she’s just a fun-loving and sexually liberated gal – she finds perverse, cruel joy in humiliating her husband. In one on-the-nose moment, someone plays “The Lady Is a Tramp” on the piano as she gleefully sings along.

Considering this was directed by the now-81-year-old director of 9½ Weeks, it’s not surprising that there are some aspects here that could have been left in the eighties. The uneven distribution of nudity between Armas and Affleck is pretty stark, and we’re meant to believe that in the year 2022 people host “dances” at each other's mansions and sing jauntily around a piano. Still, it feels depressing to have the director’s first feature in twenty years dumped unceremoniously on a streaming platform with little-to-no marketing when, in his heyday, his films grossed hundreds of millions. It also feels remarkable now to think that two of his erstwhile erotic thriller leading ladies, Glenn Close and Diane Lane, received Academy Award nominations for their roles in Fatal Attraction and Unfaithful respectively. Importantly, those movies reflected their era’s sexual mores and anxieties in a way that Deep Water does not, which is the main reason why this does not reach the level of greatness of its predecessors and will not resonate with its audience in quite the same way.

But what a thrill it is to see this sort of film – for and about adults, unafraid to be sexually explicit and morally opaque – in a day where so many films feel like watered-down juice. Could this quiet, permissive guy be a killer? Is there love hiding between these twisted cat-and-mouse games, or just jealousy and control and venom? Is bitterness better than boredom? These are all questions that percolate in your brain until the very end, which is no mean feat for a genre that often relies on improbable whiplash reversals. It sadly doesn’t look poised to bring the erotic thriller back to the forefront, but Deep Water is a worthwhile addition to the canon nonetheless.

Deep Water is available to stream on Prime Video from 18 March.