Directed By Adrian Lyne

Starring – Ben Affleck, Ana de Armas, Tracy Letts

The Plot – Vic (Affleck) and Melinda Van Allen (de Armas) are a couple in the small town of Little Wesley. Their loveless marriage is held together only by a precarious arrangement whereby, in order to avoid the messiness of divorce, Melinda is allowed to take any number of lovers as long as she does not desert her family. Vic becomes fascinated with the unsolved murder of one of Melinda’s former lovers, Malcolm McRae, and, in order to successfully drive away her current fling, takes credit for the killing. When the real murderer is apprehended, Vic’s claims are interpreted by the community as dark jokes.

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

Official Trailer | Deep Water | Hulu – YouTube

POSITIVES

This is a film purely driven by the range of performances, which help to illustrate bigger leaps of faith required to properly interpret and define this troubled couple. Affleck delivers a turn that I can confidently say is unlike anything that he’s ever portrayed on-screen before, commanding Vic with an unsettling range of tension and imposing menace that not only allows us to see Ben in a vastly different light, but also one that if you’re an Affleck fan like I am, will be candidly indulging in the range of emotions that he delivers in a single threatening look to an opposition who has disrespected him. Ana de Armas is equally alluring, both in sexual vibrancy and continuous grip on a character who is the beacon of all meanings of immaturity and selfishness. While the character is never someone, I found myself truly investing in for obvious problems with the characterization, I found Ana’s work to be right on point for what’s asked of her, made all the more endearing by how her subtle deliveries and variance of body language play toward fleshing out the motivation of Vic’s every move. Beyond the performances, the direction here from Lyne picks up right where she left off with 2002’s “Unfaithful”. Though this film doesn’t quite capture marital infidelity with the kind of subtleties of nuance of that previous effort, she does channel something palpable in the range of atmospheric tension that conveys a toxicity in the air like some invisible fog that constantly hangs over the heads of these characters. Likewise, despite the tonal ambiguity that periodically hangs over the movie’s spontaneous sequencing, I did find the moments of Lyne’s self-aware humor to be a welcome addition to an inferior second half that was crumbling at the seams. By that point, Lyne and screenwriters Zach Helm and Sam Levinson indulge in the urges of irony within the story that become apparent with scenes of a bicycle literally chasing down a car, or the fact that cops only exist in this film when they’re absolutely necessary and give in to the trashy novel origins the story so candidly sprung from.

NEGATIVES

While the erotic finds itself forcefully in the oversexualization of every horny character and situation that isn’t even remotely sexy, the thriller aspect of this genre-hybrid is dead on arrival without even an inkling of its influence. There’s no mystery to the film, as the reveal is supplanted halfway through 110 minute run time, with a big reveal that will inevitably have people saying “That’s it?”. There’s also very few moments of attained tension, both in the limitations of physicality, as well as the headache-inducing freneticism of its jaw-dropping editing. On that subject, the pasting to the film is not only confusing in a way that unintentionally adds creative obstacles to the experience and interpretation of the audience, but it also supplants questionable depictions that I couldn’t help but laugh at, for images that the production felt were important in presenting. Such an example pertains to a scene where Affleck and another male are talking in a dining room, and de Armas’ arrival is stitched together with a focus on her feet. Keep in mind, this is midway through the film, so there’s no panning to reveal her character, nor symbolic reference to why an arrival starts there cinematically. This is made all the worse with the dreadful aspects of the movie’s presentation, which use various color filters to channel atmospheric range, but instead conjure up ugliness in all of its eye-straining captivity. Interior scenes are too dark to sometimes properly read the body language of what’s happening slightly out of frame, and exterior sequences shine a vibrancy of artificiality in lighting schemes that all but illustrate the reflectors of production that are obviously permeating off-screen. Problems with this film don’t just deduce themselves to technical aspects, however, as this screenplay is full of problematic instances that summarize the experience as sloppy. There are plot threads introduced, then abandoned, useless supporting casts like Lil Rel Howery and Tracy Letts, who have little or nothing to do creatively with the plot, and a complete lack of backstory for the protagonists that kept me from ever investing in their marital plight. The latter is made even worse at the halfway point, where the film dramatically shifts their characters in ways that are never earned, and instead just surface because the film requires them to. For the entire first half of the film, Melinda is bothered by her six-year-old daughter in ways that allude to her all but fantasizing about killing her, yet in the second half she becomes nurturing mom without even a shred of sincerity to her transformation. Speaking of daughter, the child actress in this film is the pits in both authenticity and delivery, made even worse with lines of dialogue that feel like they were shaped by an adult off-screen, instead of naturally from the child we see before us. Whenever this kid is on-screen, the movie focuses on her in ways that all but allude to the director saying “Isn’t she cute?”, and its focus unabashedly takes the sharpness away from the developments of the narrative, all the while gift-wrapping us one more shitty child performance that rests her laurels on the bounty of her appearance, instead of the seamlessness of her deliveries.

OVERALL

“Deep Water” sinks expectations with a clumsy execution that never attains merit or meaning in the two ingredients of erotic thriller’s that it falsifies in its classification. Though the performances of Affleck and de Armas are right on point with two mysterious turns serving as the manifestation of marital grief, the film surrounding them drains clarity with technical and creative obstacles that keep it from ever evading shallow territories.

My Grade: 3/10 or F+