Deep Water Review: Adrian Lyne’s Erotic Thriller Goes Off the Deep End

For a long spell, Adrian Lyne’s long-delayed Deep Water emits a bitterly sensual charge. Adapted by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson from Patricia Highsmith’s novel of the same name, the film suggests a gene splice of Lyne’s Unfaithful and David Fincher’s Gone Girl, revealing how easily a despairing man’s sense of impotency turbocharges his rage.

The film’s unexpected intrigue is partly a matter of context. In the 1980s, when Lyne was the purveyor of erotic thrillers like 9 ½ Weeks and Fatal Attraction, even Deep Water’s strongest sections might’ve been taken for granted. But in 2022, with American cinema having given up on sex as a viable subject for drama, the film initially feels dangerous, even personal.

Lyne’s ’80s cinema pushed everything, from the characters’ emotions to the filmmaker’s formalism, to the fore in a manner that was fashionable to American pop cinema at the time. In Deep Water, however, Lyne initially aims for a more strongly implicative aura in the key of a Claude Chabrol thriller, in which every line of dialogue is freighted with potential subtext, blurring our understanding of the rules of the game that we’re watching unfold.

The plot of the film is simple, even consciously reductive: A couple face off in a prolonged bout of sexual humiliation, with the man playing the accommodating cuckold to the woman’s indulgent harridan. The mystery concerns the nature of the arrangement: Are both getting off, or is the situation one-sided? Melinda (Ana de Armas) gets drunk seemingly every night, hanging all over her many young male admirers, while her older husband, Vic (Ben Affleck), watches with his various friends from the sidelines of bars and posh parties. Vic is a rich and handsome man, but it’s easy to see why Melinda is bored, as he exudes a sense of defeated contemptuousness that pushes her increasingly audacious indiscretions back into her face.

In other words, Melinda resents Vic’s resentment—a very truthful, seldom broached by cinema, acknowledgement of a way in which a relationship can turn bad. This texture cuts to the heart of why Deep Water is initially so head-spinning, as its erotic-thriller stylization—the menacingly soft, moneyed, feverish colors—mesh unexpectedly with a specific, and refreshingly adult, examination of a relationship’s sexual demons.

Lyne, Helm, and Levinson are willing to follow this relationship beyond the barriers of political correctness. Melinda is so stereotypically emasculating that she exists as a taunt from the filmmaker who got into hot water over Fatal Attraction’s “one-night stand from hell.” Yet it’s clear that Melinda has assumed a role, daring Vic to fuck her as a fierce, living and breathing woman, rather than as his wife and mother of the daughter to whom she’s indifferent.

By contrast, Vic mostly seems to relish failing to arise to the occasion (the couple’s most erotic moment pivots on him shaving her legs, an act of teasing on her part and subjugation on his). Several explanations for Vic’s reticence appear to be viable, maybe even simultaneously: He likes being sapped of dignity and sexual power, having grown addicted to the “poor me” routine; he gets his jollies somewhere else; or he’s given up on his marriage and is perhaps, in the ultimate act of petulant passivity, waiting for Melinda to kill it.

As Vic and Melinda cut each other down to size, usually for the benefit of Melinda’s lovers, Deep Water comes to suggest a modern cover of the pre-Code classic The Thin Man set in hell, and this tartness is where Highsmith’s influence feels most exhilaratingly apparent. Whereas William Powell and Myrna Loy’s Nick and Nora Charles flaunted their debauched love to their friends, Vic and Melinda make sport of their equally privileged discontent.

De Armas and Affleck have suggestively conflicting ways of volleying their dialogue back and forth. De Armas, a rising ingenue looking to make her mark, wrings every line for every ounce of aggression that it can yield, while Affleck, a longtime survivor of the up-and-down fame game, throws his lines away, suggesting with often devastating precision that Vic barely finds Melinda worth defending himself against. Affleck has become a master of playing men stifled by feelings of put-upon-ness, of elucidating weaponized passive aggression.

Most obviously, Vic is quite similar to Affleck’s hapless, beleaguered character from Gone Girl, except that Deep Water doesn’t let its protagonist off the hook by blaming everything on the woman. Ultimately, though, Deep Water is revealed to be Vic’s movie, and there’s a suggestion of sexism to it. Lyne doesn’t achieve the balance here that he did in Unfaithful, in which Richard Gere and Diane Lane’s characters were each allowed to command our empathy.

Melinda’s disappointment in Vic and anger with his condescension is quite scrutable, yet the narrative deck is still stacked against her. Even as Vic grows sinister, suggesting with hilarious matter-of-factness that he’s killed some of Melinda’s lovers, he commands our and the filmmakers’ sympathy, crowding out Melinda, who essentially remains an emasculation nightmare throughout the film. Such an imbalance recalls Fatal Attraction, which was firmly rooted in the male protagonist’s purview, yet Glenn Close had a ferocity that partially transcended that script’s limitations. De Armas doesn’t here, as she’s outfoxed by the challenge of playing superficiality, or maybe an illusion thereof, without succumbing to it.

Eventually, as Deep Water abandons its compelling ambiguities, the filmmakers throw Affleck under the bus as well. The film’s first half, so wonderfully rich in emotional and physical suggestion, gives way to a hokey, awkwardly staged thriller in which someone commits several ludicrous murders, sometimes almost literally under everyone else’s noses. Once the matter of whether or not Vic is a real killer is resolved, Affleck has nowhere to go with his performance, freezing into the sort of vague brooding that often gets him ridiculed online.

Astonishingly, the murders don’t intensify the relationship at the center of the film, as they appear to exist in their own orbit. Let’s say that Vic is the killer. Wouldn’t that, perversely, be the apotheosis of the sort of display of passion that Melinda craves? Or if he isn’t, might she be, perhaps even more perversely, a bit disappointed? Neither possibility is broached.

What’s lacking here, which is abundant in good erotic thrillers, is the plunge into formal and narrative insanity that utilizes lurid tropes as symbols for ordinary romantic and sexual crises. Instead, Deep Water becomes crude in all the wrong ways: Melinda is forgotten by the filmmakers, while Vic is put through a series of impersonal genre-movie exertions. The finale, a wan reprise of Unfaithful’s final act of unexpected acceptance, feels less like a catharsis than a half-hearted gesture committed by a promising film that lost its way.