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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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Watch Deep Water with a subscription on Hulu.

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Viewers desperately seeking a new erotic thriller might find Deep Water worth a dip, but it's far from director Adrian Lyne's best work.

Between the unlikable characters, a story that's mostly pretty dull, and an annoying ending, it's hard to pick Deep Water 's worst quality.

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Adrian Lyne

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Sad Affleck gets his revenge in Hulu’s erotic thriller throwback Deep Water

After 20 years away, Fatal Attraction director and steamy drama king Adrian Lyne is back in action

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There’s something pleasurably disreputable about Adrian Lyne’s twisted domestic drama Deep Water — a trashy, tabloid scandalousness that’s almost quaint. It’s the first film in 20 years from Lyne, who ruled the erotic-thriller genre of the 1980s and ’90s with a string of steamy smash hits like Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal . The film, which comes directly to Hulu on March 18, stars Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, who began a headline-grabbing romance on set, but split long before the producers of the pandemic-delayed film could spin a publicity campaign around them. Even the manner of its release carries a whiff of opprobrium, of something illicit. Disney, which acquired the movie when it bought 20th Century Fox, delayed it twice before pulling its theatrical release altogether, eventually palming it off on Hulu (and Amazon, for international release) with almost tangible distaste. Could it be so perverted, so out of step with the times, or just so plain bad?

“Not really” is the answer to all three questions. True to Lyne’s form, Deep Water is a slick, entertaining cod-psychological thriller, just classy enough to be aspirational, and just seedy enough to satisfy a craving for cinematic junk food. And while its fate might seem ignominious for a film that was once perceived, by its producers at least, as a prestige production — they were clearly fishing for another Gone Girl — it’s a perfect prospect for a Friday night in with a bucket-sized glass of wine.

Deep Water is based on the classic 1957 novel by The Talented Mr. Ripley author Patricia Highsmith at her sour, misanthropic best. Highsmith loved nothing more than to pin down, with sadistic precision, the frustrated, dark desires of the suburban American male. The filmmakers’ unlikely stroke of genius was realizing the perfect modern subject for one of her icy studies of emasculation would be Ben Affleck.

Affleck plays Vic Van Allen, a wealthy idler who has retired to the genteel suburbs of New Orleans on the spoils of a microchip he designed for combat drones. He cycles, edits a vanity arts quarterly, dotes on his sparky 6-year-old daughter Trixie, and breeds snails in his garage. He also tolerates his wife Melinda (de Armas), a fiery lush who conducts brazen affairs with lunkheaded, pretty young men right under Vic’s nose, flaunting them at social events and even inviting them round for awkward dinners. Vic’s friends regard his forbearance with a mixture of admiration, pity, and frustration. What holds him back is the central mystery of the story; whether and when he will snap is what drives the suspense.

Vic is a strange character. He seems to wander through his life in a deadened daze, yet he isn’t exactly passive. He always seems to be in control — perhaps too much control. He only comes fully to life when talking to Trixie or when gazing in humid adoration at his snails, scenes which Lyne and cinematographer Eigil Bryld shoot with an alien glow. (The snails are a wonderfully weird and unsettling touch of Highsmith’s; Lyne has said that the studio was eager to cut them, but he rightly insisted on keeping them in.)

Affleck’s performance is brilliantly modulated. Most of the time, he inhabits Vic with a terrible inertness, only emphasized by his physical size. As he looms darkly in the frame, even his stubble looking depressed, it can seem as if the performance is a conscious self-parody of the Sad Affleck meme . But there are also moments where he shows a scary inch of steel. A previous boyfriend of Melinda’s disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and early in the film, Vic scares off her latest beau by claiming to have killed him. Affleck’s suppressed, hyper-controlled rage makes it all too believable. He keeps Vic deliberately unreadable, up to and even beyond the pool party that brings things to a head midway through the film.

With Melinda, Vic is something else again. In Highsmith’s novel, their marriage is bitter and loveless, but that isn’t Lyne’s kind of kink. So in the film, the couple’s cycle of jealousy and provocation is given a perverse sexual charge. De Armas is an intensely charismatic performer; think of how charming she was in Knives Out , or of how swiftly and elegantly she stole the whole of No Time to Die , and imagine all that energy channeled into a feature-length firework display of messy sexuality. She might have overwhelmed such a subdued Affleck, but it’s more like a meeting between unstoppable force and immovable object. The power dynamic isn’t as one-sided as it appears. Vic’s refusal to let Melinda get a rise out of him is another kind of control, and Lyne, dirty-minded as ever, suggests he might be getting a kick out of it — or they both might.

Not that Deep Water is really a work of deep psychological complexity. Lyne has picked up right where he left off with 2002’s Unfaithful (the one where Diane Lane thinks about sex on a train). It’s almost shocking how untroubled his work has been by 20 years in the wilderness, failing to get projects greenlit.

During that interval, his themes, filmmaking style, and gender politics (to the extent he has any) have gone completely out of fashion. His movies carry an air of sophistication, thanks to authentically great performances and solid scripts (in Deep Water ’s case, by Zach Helm and Euphoria showrunner Sam Levinson), and he’s up there with Ridley and Tony Scott as one of the most influential visual stylists of his generation. His blend of lavish real-estate porn and sultry, backlit extreme close-ups has done so much to define what the last three and a half decades of movie and TV dramas look like. But his Hitchcockian overtones are broad, his instincts pulpy, and for the most part, he makes unashamed potboilers that lay it all out on the surface. Deep Water is no different.

That’s why it doesn’t really harm the film that it gets a bit silly as it builds to a climax. It’s a nostalgic pleasure to watch a starry, elevated bit of hokum like this go for the jugular. Lyne smartly puts playwright and great character actor Tracy Letts in the small but key role of a local writer who believes Vic’s line about killing one of Melinda’s boyfriends, and takes his suspicions to their logical conclusion. Letts’ simmering envy and vanity add a nice tang to the curdled melodrama, while the decision to modify Highsmith’s bleak conclusion works surprisingly well.

But the film belongs to de Armas and Affleck. Particularly Affleck, who, in performances as varied as this and his uproarious role in The Last Duel , is showing not only his range and resourcefulness as an actor, but also a sly gift for manipulation of his own image. Sad Affleck is a relatable avatar of thwarted, impotent middle age, of clutching defeat from the jaws of privilege and success. Deep Water gives us the vicarious thrill of watching him let it all go.

Deep Water will begin streaming on Hulu on March 18.

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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 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: Ana de Armas Cucks Ben Affleck Into a Murderer in Adrian Lyne’s Vintage Erotic Thriller

David ehrlich.

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Patricia Highsmith’s “ Deep Water ” is a 1957 novel about a smart man in a soured marriage who grows so mad with jealousy over the affairs that his wife keeps flaunting in front of his face — and so resentful toward the reliable boorishness of her lovers — that he starts murdering her boy-toys with the same brazenness that she took them into her bed. Adrian Lyne ’s “Deep Water” is a 2022 Hulu movie about a smart man in a soured marriage who grows so mad with jealousy over the affairs that his wife keeps flaunting in front of his face — and so resentful toward the reliable boorishness of her lovers — that he starts murdering her boy-toys with the same brazenness that she took them into her bed… and it makes his wife horny as hell.

The distinction is subtle until the moment it’s not. Which isn’t to say that Melinda Van Allen was innocent in Highsmith’s version, only that Lyne’s faithful but slyly transformative adaptation — its script credited to the MadLibs-worthy duo of “Euphoria” creator Sam Levinson and “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium” writer-director Zach Helm — is galvanized by the suggestion that she gets off on the idea of her husband’s crimes.

The old Melinda was plenty sadistic towards hubby Vic, but she immediately began plotting her escape once it was clear that she could be married to a serial killer. The new Melinda is just as cruel and no less suspicious, but the mere idea that the stale loaf of Wonder Bread she’s married to might have found his balls for the first time since their six-year-old daughter was conceived is too exciting for her to cut and run.

“He doesn’t want to control me like a normal man,” she laments to a friend at one of the lavish theme parties that all of the pod-people in the Van Allens’ wealthy New Orleans neighborhood seem to attend every weekend. To some, that might sound like a good thing. The way Ana de Armas says it, it’s a completely valid excuse to subject Ben Affleck to the most unapologetic cuckery an actor has had to endure on screen since William H. Macy in “Boogie Nights.” In other words, 81-year-old Adrian Lyne hasn’t lost his swing in the two-decade absence he’s taken since “Unfaithful,” and it’s so dang good to have him back, even if only for one last ride, and even if that ride is skipping right past movie theaters.

For those of you aren’t old enough to remember when it was legal for movies to have sex in them, Lyne was the master of erotic thrillers about infidelity. “Fatal Attraction,” “Indecent Proposal,” the 1997 Showtime version of “Lolita” (intensely uncomfortable, even by “Lolita” standards!), if people were fucking around on their spouses, Lyne was the guy who insisted you find out. Also, he directed “Flashdance.” And while the filmmaker’s craft has never been shakier than it is in this stilted and wildly uneven tale about the twisted strings that tie some couples together, it’s also never been clearer that said filmmaker is Adrian Lyne. Not only does this delirious movie find him swan-diving back into the same fetid lap pool of envy, lust, and psychosexual control where he used to swim laps every morning, it finds that he’s basically got an entire lane to himself.

“Deep Water” is shallow on the details of the Van Allens’ marriage, but it’s clear from the start that the most beautiful couple in town have something pretty ugly back at home. Worse, everyone else knows it. Their friends and neighbors — a kibitzy social group that includes Lil Rey Howery, Rachel Blanchard, and the great Dash Mihok playing someone named Jonas Fernandez — may not be aware that Vic and Melinda have been sleeping in separate beds, but that’s basically the only aspect of her sex life that Melinda doesn’t wantonly put on public display.

Melinda loves that all of their friends and neighbors are at the same party to see her canoodle with a mouth-breathing grad student named Joel (Brendan C. Miller, serving great “I’m young enough to think this is about me” energy as the first of Melinda’s many lovers we meet), even if the spectacle doesn’t seem to get a rise out of her husband. All it does is make him look like a Vic-tim — a man of infinite grace who’s willing to suffer any indignity for the sake of the daughter he loves (cute kiddo Grace Jenkins). It’s a role that affords him a lot of goodwill in the community, which comes in handy once he starts telling Joel that he murdered the last guy who fooled around with his wife.

Is he joking, or is he one of Highsmith’s Ripley-like sociopaths hiding in plain sight? Either way you slice it, our boy isn’t handling things as well as it might seem. A bored engineer who retired young after selling his drone technology to the government — ironic for someone who can’t even surveil the comings and goings inside his own house! — Vic has precious little to distract him from the spectacle of his decidedly unspectacular marriage. His only comforts: taking daughter Trixie to school, tending to the massive snail farm he keeps in the basement like a totally normal guy who doesn’t murder people (men will literally spawn thousands of gastropods instead of going to therapy), and receiving some occasional road head from his wife whenever she feels threatened by the obvious fact that every other woman in town wants to get humped by her husband.

“Deep Water” may be as short on steaminess and stingy with nudity as you might expect from a movie in which sex is almost exclusively used as a weapon, but Lyne maintains a studied fascination in the messiness that tends to follow — emotional or otherwise. (Or, told another way, this critic can’t remember the last time I saw an A-list movie star pick a pubic hair out of her teeth on the big screen.)

It’s a messiness that doesn’t sit well with Vic’s clean-shaven sensibilities. Brooding so hard that he makes his Bruce Wayne seem like James Corden by comparison, Affleck delivers an implosive performance that renders Mr. Van Allen as a former golden boy who thought he built the perfect family, only to realize that he married the kind of woman you’re supposed to date before your wife. That’s how the movie tees things up, at least, as the early portions of “Deep Water” demonize Melinda so aggressively that she can only be understood through the lens of such retrograde Barstool logic. De Armas’ sultry performance doubles down on that take, allowing Melinda to go full succubus right out of the gate so that she can reel it back in and complicate her complicity once Vic starts getting blood on his hands.

As the film unfolds, however, Lyne’s cryptic approach begins to allow for more nuanced reads, even if viewers have to fill in most of the blanks for themselves (and even if basic details about who is doing what to whom become so obscured by sloppy writing and/or studio interference that the third act devolves into a campy riot of coincidences, car crashes, and a perfectly cast Tracy Letts screaming about the evils of auto-correct). Highsmith wouldn’t dream of hanging an erotic thriller on a good man and his “crazy” sexpot of a wife, and there’s no world in which the director of “Fatal Attraction” and “Unfaithful” would allow for such uneven distribution of blame in any story of a marriage gone bad.

The closer that “Deep Water” comes to boiling over (the hunky likes of Jacob Elordi and Finn Wittrock eventually getting stirred into the pot), the sillier it gets. We’re talking about de Armas cooking the most emasculating grilled cheese sandwich in cinematic history, and Affleck delivering a line like “the snails are not for eating” with enough deranged pathos to convince you that bad movies are better than good ones. But the sillier it gets, the more sensitively it portrays how it got there. In a vacuum, Vic and Melinda are unsolvable mysteries. On their own, it might seem like he’s impotent, or that she was born with an unslakable need to make him feel that way. Together, they reveal one another to be people who aren’t stunted by desire so much as they’re provoked by insecurity. Their marriage is a caricature of an all too common dilemma that seems to affect even the most beautiful of couples: How do you restore the stability of a marriage when you start to feel your partner getting bored? Can you fix the wound with sugar, or does it require a heavy pinch of salt?

Undying love is nice and all, but sometimes you need to feel like your partner is willing to kill for it too.

“Deep Water” will be available to stream on Hulu starting Friday, March 18.

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

The first new movie in 20 years from director Adrian Lyne (‘Fatal Attraction,’ ‘Indecent Proposal’) is an updated adaptation of a 1957 novel by Patricia Highsmith

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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’

Rating: R, for sexual content, nudity, language and some violence When: Available today Where: Hulu Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes

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Deep Water (I) (2022)

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• fewer cute kid bits (and FYI, kids her age who do science experiments don't listen to "Old McDonald")
• Less time showing how the beautiful people have a good time, because it looks really boring. Seriously, drinking games? Is this a frat house?
• Cut out hubby looking at wife with malice in his eyes while she cuckolds him, which brings me to what I really didn't like about this movie.

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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.

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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.

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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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Deep Water Review

18 Mar 2022

On paper, Adrian Lyne looked like a safe bet when it came to choosing a director to bring an erotic, psychological thriller like Deep Water to life. Based on the Patricia Highsmith novel of the same name — about a husband and wife, the lovers she takes, and the fallout of a lie about murdering her last paramour — it is exactly the type of story that the filmmaker behind 9½ Weeks , Indecent Proposal and Lolita would be suited to. And yet, after a 20-year absence since the release of his last film, 2002’s Unfaithful , Lyne seems to have softened his edges.

The odd couple at the centre of this smalltown intrigue are Vic and Melinda Van Allen, played by Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas , who, after seven years together, have made a pretty iffy deal: she can have affairs with other men as long as she stays in the marriage for the sake of a daughter that only he seems to show much affection for.

That ‘Sad Affleck’ meme comes to mind every time the camera closes in on Vic’s face while watching his younger, dissatisfied wife flirt around with pretty boys at various locations: a neighbour’s garden here, another neighbour’s pool there, even their own dining room. De Armas certainly doesn’t endear Melinda to you, delivering her flagrant marital disregard with stunning viciousness and indifference to her husband’s feelings. But even though she shows motherly distance towards their child, Evelyn, the underlying pain and frustration in her wide eyes do evoke empathy for a woman who feels like a trophy wife and might have been pressured into parenthood too early.

Paparazzi photos of De Armas and Affleck from their brief relationship are believably hornier than most scenes. It is easily Lyne’s tamest erotic thriller.

Affleck, on the other hand, seems miscast as the sort of mild-mannered cuckold who, after teasing the idea that he murdered his wife’s ex-lover who disappeared, may just have developed his own dangerous, sociopathic impulses. Even when the narrative descends into entertaining ’90s-thriller levels of violent absurdity, Affleck is never convincing. He’s unfortunately not as charmingly disturbing as his pal Matt Damon in the title role of The Talented Mr Ripley — another of Highsmith’s psychopathic leading men — and as the movie hinges on this protagonist’s movements, it’s an underwhelming undertaking.

Deep Water couldn’t be further from the glossy, Mediterranean aesthetic of Anthony Minghella’s Ripley adaptation. Most of the action takes place in the expansive homes of a wealthy American community. That everything looks cold and clinical reinforces the Van Allens’ frosty and inhospitable marriage — as does composer Marco Beltrami’s melancholic strings in the score — but it also makes for a drab-looking film that reduces the potency of the sex scenes. They’re tempered further by erratic editing, especially in moments where imagination and reality collide. Paparazzi photos of De Armas and Affleck from their brief relationship are believably hornier than most scenes. It is easily Lyne’s tamest erotic thriller.

The script, co-written by Zach Helm ( Stranger Than Fiction ) and Sam Levinson ( Euphoria , Malcolm & Marie ) makes various changes from the original novel as a way to more obviously establish the potential for amorality in its male protagonist. An awkward garden party scene between Tracy Letts’ intrusive pulp-fiction writer Lionel and Vic, discussing the latter’s early retirement from selling a microchip for military use, is subtle but aptly lays the foundation for not only their antagonistic relationship but also for suspicion and paranoia to ferment. Yet the writers pull their punches by the final act, and never follow through with Highsmith’s shocking ending.

The Van Allens rarely function as more than stock characters in need of deeper introspection to warrant our attention, and it is really only through the sensual, kinetic performance of de Armas that any sense of passionate sentiment or nervous emotion is given life. The film is hindered by lacklustre direction and a script barely willing to scrape the surface of what could have been an intense, psychosexual exploration of masculinity, morality and marriage.

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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‘Deep Water’ Ending Explained: Ben Affleck’s Thriller Is a Twisted Love Story

Where to stream:.

• Deep Water (2022)
• Ben Affleck

Jennifer Lopez Sets The Record Straight On 'The View' After Alyssa Farah Griffin Asks About Her Matching Valentine's Tattoos With Ben Affleck: "We Did Not!" 

Stream it or skip it: 'the accountant' on netflix, with ben affleck doing math and murder, 'the accountant 2:' release date, plot, and everything we know about the ben affleck sequel, ‘the accountant’ ending explained: why does ben affleck send anna kendrick a painting.

Warning: This article contains major Deep Water spoilers. As in, pretty much every Deep Water spoiler imaginable. Read it at your own risk.

It’s been a long journey for Deep Water , the erotic thriller starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas . Directed by Adrian Lyne, who is best known for his provocative ’80s thriller  Fatal Attraction , this latest sexy drama first went into development in 2013, filmed in 2019, and was initially scheduled for release in 2020. After being delayed quite a few times—so many times that Affleck and de Armas got together and broke up IRL— Deep Water has now finally been released, streaming on Hulu in the U.S. and on Amazon Prime internationally.

With the promise of both “erotic” and Ana de Armas, Deep Water is sure to be a popular watch on Hulu. But viewers may be surprised to find slightly less sex and intrigue than they were expecting. Instead, a character study of two psychologically disturbed people unfolds.

But that’s not to say there isn’t any action. The last act of Deep Water comes with dark twists and turns that you may or may not see coming—and that you may or may not fully understand. Fear not, because Decider is here to help. Read on for the Deep Water plot summary and the Deep Water ending, explained.

WHAT IS THE BEN AFFLECK MOVIE DEEP WATER ABOUT? DEEP WATER PLOT SUMMARY:

Vic Van Allen (Ben Affleck) retired young and rich after his work in the morally dubious drone industry. He’s in love with his young, beautiful wife Melinda (Ana de Armas), she loves him back, and they have a young child together named Trixie. But Melinda doesn’t seem interested in motherhood—she is interested in sleeping with a lot of other men.

Vic is well aware of Melinda’s sidepieces, whom she calls her “friends,” because she makes only the faintest of attempts to hide her infidelity. At first, it seems Vic has an oddly calm attitude about his wife cheating on him, but we soon learn that it does bother him—he just has a funny way of showing it.

As it happens, one of her “friends” went missing recently. At a party, Melinda introduces Vic to a new friend, Joel, whom she shamelessly flirts with all night. When Joel thanks Vic for letting him “see” his wife, Vic calmly informs Joel that he killed the last man Melinda saw, Martin. Vic tells Joel that he killed Martin with a hammer. Though Vic later claims—when Melinda finds out and gets upset—that it was a bad joke, it doesn’t sound like Vic is joking. Joel doesn’t think so, either—he is scared off and stops seeing Melinda.

But that doesn’t stop Melinda from seeing guys. Her next hot, young pursuit is a pianist named Charlie (played by The Kissing Booth ‘s Jacob Elordi). Vic is angry when he uncovers the affair, and he starts to get cozy with the wife (Kristen Connolly) of an older writer Don Wilson (Tracy Letts), who was rude to him at a party. Eventually, Martin’s body is discovered: he was killed via gunshot, not by hammer, and a different suspect is arrested. It seems that Vic really did not kill him—but, as Don points out, Vic did seem to take pleasure in claiming credit for killing him. Which is not a great look.

At yet another party (all these people do is party!), Melinda is flirting with her new lover Charlie. Folks are hanging out in the pool when it begins to rain. Everyone heads inside—everyone, that is, except for Vic and Charlie. We don’t see what happens, but we do see Vic looking menacingly in Charlie’s direction. Later, after Vic comes inside, the party-goers discover Charlie’s dead body in the pool. Don and Vic try to revive him and drop Charlie on his head while pulling him out of the pool. But, as they tell the police later, Charlie is already dead.

Melinda is certain that Vic killed Charlie. She tells the police as much, but Vic manages to convince them that she is unstable, and also, there is not enough evidence against him. However, Don believes Melinda’s theory, and the two of them begin meeting behind Vic’s back. Together, they hire a private investigator to trail Vic—but Vic realizes what they have done, and angrily barges in Don while he’s eating dinner with his family, and demands he put a stop to it.

Meanwhile, Melinda has yet another friend over for dinner: Tony (played by Finn Wittrock), her ex-boyfriend. Tony wants to eat some of Vic’s pet snails for dinner, but Vic explains, in the movie’s best line, that “the snails are not for eating,” because they are poisonous without the proper prep work. You might expect someone to get poisoned, in that case, but this turns out to be a red herring. Vic convinces Tony to come for a drive with him by telling him there’s a building site that Melinda wants to show him. Instead, Vic recklessly drives Tony into a remote part of the woods with no cell service and kills Tony by pushing him down a cliff. He throws Tony’s body into the river.

WHAT ARE THE DEEP WATER SPOILERS? DEEP WATER ENDING EXPLAINED:

Spoiler alert: Vic kills Tony, and he almost definitely killed Charlie, too. After killing Tony, Vic and Melinda have something of a “honeymoon” period in their marriage. They have a lovely family picnic right near the very spot where Vic disposed of Tony’s body. When Vic sees that the body is partially visible in the river, he later returns on his bike to the spot, alone, to better hide it.

While Vic is poking at the body with a stick—presumably hoping to dislodge it so it will float further down river—he’s interrupted by Don. It’s unclear whether Don knew Vic was there because of the P.I., or if he just happened to be in the area. Either way, Don is immediately suspicious, steps down to get a closer look, and sees the body in the water. Don realizes Vic must have killed someone and flees in his car. Vic immediately pursues Don on his bike, using a shortcut to cut him off. Don, who was trying to text his wife that he was right, is startled when Vic pulls out ahead of him. He swerves his car wildly and drives straight off a cliff, hitting the rocks on the way down into the river. He is, presumably, dead.

Meanwhile, back at the house, Melinda finds Tony’s wallet inside one of the snail containers. She realizes that the reason she hasn’t been able to get in touch with Tony is that Vic killed him. Melinda packs a bag, seemingly prepared to leave Vic, but her daughter throws the bag into the pool and informs Melinda they are not leaving.

Vic bikes home, and Melinda greets him sitting on the steps, as if everything is normal—the same way she greeted him in the very first scene of the film. Then she tells him, “I saw Tony,” and walks upstairs. We then see Melinda burning Tony’s driver’s license. Obviously, given that Tony is dead, it’s impossible that Melinda saw him, as Vic well knows. But by telling him that she saw him, and by burning his license, we understand that Melinda has decided to stand by Vic and help him cover up his crime. He accepts that she is an adulterer, and she accepts that he is a murderer. Marriage is all about compromise!

IS THERE A DEEP WATER POST CREDITS SCENE?

Sort of. A mid-credits scene features Trixie the daughter in the back seat of a car, singing along to Leo Sayer’s 1976 hit, “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing.” It’s very cute footage, but it’s tonal whiplash considering what we just watched. Also, it doesn’t have anything to do with the plot of the film. It’s more like a blooper scene than an after-credits scene—don’t read into it.

Watch Deep Water on Hulu

• Ending Explained

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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.

‘Hypnotic’ Brutally Ends Ben Affleck’s Movie Hot Streak

SLEEP-INDUCING

The mind powers that feature so heavily in the film would be best used to make us forget that it exists.

Nick Schager

Entertainment Critic

Photo by Ketchup Entertainment

Ben Affleck has been on a rather impressive winning streak as of late, beginning with his sterling work in Gavin O’Connor’s underseen 2020 gem The Way Back and continuing with his excellent supporting turns in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel and George Clooney’s The Tender Bar (both from 2021)—as well as in last month’s Air , which he also directed.

Factor in the relatively redemptive recut of Zack Snyder’s Justice League and the pulpy Deep Water , and the 50-year-old actor seems to have found a solid groove, proving equally comfortable in dramas, thrillers, historical epics, and superhero sagas that know how to take prime advantage of his stout, charismatic force of personality.

All of which makes Hypnotic so brutally disappointing.

Premiering in theaters on May 12 following its recent debut at the SXSW Film and TV Festival , Affleck’s latest is a B-movie with a C+ premise and D-minus execution, the last of which largely falls at the feet of director Robert Rodriguez . Working from a script co-written with Max Borenstein ( Godzilla vs. Kong ), the Desperado and Spy Kids auteur’s film is a mess from top to bottom, as dimly conceived as it is clunkily constructed.

A patchwork quilt of elements borrowed from The Matrix , Vertigo , Inception , and Memento (not to mention Stranger Things and the numerous Stephen King novels that preceded it), it’s a fiasco which reminds one that even Hollywood’s most talented aren’t immune from falling flat on their faces.

Hypnotic opens with a woman calling out to Danny Rourke (Affleck), set to the close-up sight of his eye—one of myriad spherical images that populate these proceedings, and serve as Rodriguez’s means of tipping his hand from the start that the forthcoming tale will be circular in nature. Meanwhile, maze-like designs on elevator and garage walls (among other surfaces) imply a labyrinthine mystery to come.

At outset, that has little to do with Rourke, a city cop still struggling to get over the fact that his beloved daughter Minnie (Ionie Nieves) was kidnapped at a playground by a creepy young man who now claims to have no memory of committing the abduction or the girl’s whereabouts. Though cleared by his therapist to return to active duty, Rourke remains traumatized, and that’s before he rejoins his partner Nicks (JD Pardo) and is promptly informed that an anonymous tipster is predicting yet another in an ongoing series of bank robberies.

At the scene of the supposed crime, chaos erupts when Rourke and Nicks witness a strange man (William Fichtner) compel strangers to do his bidding via a series of ostensibly mundane code words, all so he might acquire the contents of a safety deposit box. Rourke reaches that container first and, inside, finds a photo of his missing daughter that features the words “Van Dellrayne”—the same name as Fichtner’s baddie.

For unknown reasons, Rourke proves resistant to Dellrayne’s paranormal persuasions and escapes this calamitous encounter unscathed. Shortly thereafter, he’s pointed in the direction of Diana Cruz (Alice Braga), a local psychic who, following a near-fatal encounter with Dellrayne, explains to Rourke the unbelievable situation at hand: Dellrayne is a “hypnotic” with the power to warp the perspectives (and, thus, behavior) of anyone he encounters, creating “constructs” that make his victims think they’re behaving normally while doing his bidding.

Despite the wannabe-novel way in which Diana describes it, Dellrayne is just a Professor X-grade mutant who can control people’s minds, and since he’s the strongest of his kind, Rourke and Diana have little recourse but to repeatedly flee him and those he sends after them. This is only the first of many revelations that Hypnotic has in store, although given the “nothing is as it seems” game being played here, it’s not difficult to foresee the litany of ensuing surprises.

Before long, Rourke is learning all sorts of things about himself, Diana, Dellrayne, and his beloved little girl, most of it courtesy of Diana’s vomitous exposition dumps, which slow the action to a crawl in order to clue audiences into the nonsense propelling the narrative forward.

Rodriguez and Borenstein’s script is a series of long-winded explanations about its supernatural specifics (and mythology) interspersed with ho-hum shootouts and chase sequences, and its chintzy silliness more than mildly recalls Nicolas Cage’s 2007 sci-fi dud Next . Rodriguez’s noir-ish shadows and self-consciously showy camerawork are as clichéd as every aspect of his story. Eventually, that turns out to be part of the point, since Hypnotic is, at heart, a tale about using recognizable fictional conventions to unlock genuine truths.

Unfortunately, however, the film isn’t canny enough to do anything with that potentially intriguing meta angle; it believes that its every twist is mind-blowing enough to keep the action engaging on its own baseline genre terms—an assumption that turns out to be seriously misguided.

As befitting Rourke’s screwy-headed condition, Affleck grimaces, scowls, and looks dazed and confused throughout most of Hypnotic . Only in its later passages does he get to express anything resembling a convincing emotion or trace of individuality, but by that point, it’s too little, too late. In the race to its conclusion, the film piles bombshell upon bombshell in a vain attempt to astonish viewers. In doing so, it finally shows a few faint flickers of life—and allows its lead to do likewise. The problem is that the eye-openers it peddles are photocopies of photocopies of shockers pilfered from far better movies.

Even the appearance of the reliably entertaining Jeff Fahey (a Rodriguez favorite ever since the director cast him in 2007’s Planet Terror ) winds up being a letdown, since the actor is squandered during a finale that’s chiefly fixated on shots of Affleck, Fichtner, and others staring intensely at each other—because, you know, they’re using their mind powers. Any bargain basement psychic can see where this is going by the midway point. Worse, however, is the choppy pace at which it heads there—epitomized by a first act that moves so fast, it feels as if significant plot chunks were hastily excised in order to keep the runtime tight.

Hypnotic is ultimately a lot like Rourke describes Minnie at the playground, spinning round and round until it’s so dizzy that it collapses. It’s the kind of dud that appears destined for a quick theatrical demise—and, then, to be forgotten by everyone who sees it.

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READ THIS LIST

Ben Affleck Movies New Streaming Success Is A Reminder To Watch This 4-Year-Old Drama With 93% On Rotten Tomatoes

• The Way Back stars Ben Affleck as troubled coach Jack, tackling themes of alcoholism, grief, and personal redemption.
• Another Round, a 2020 film, explores alcohol abuse with a more lighthearted tone than The Way Back, offering a unique perspective.
• Another Round received better reviews than The Way Back for its high-concept approach and rich characters and themes.

The popularity of Ben Affleck's celebrated drama The Way Back is a great reminder to watch another 2020 movie with similar themes. Affleck stars as former high school basketball phenom Jack Cunningham and leads The Way Back's cast alongside his assistant coach Dan (Al Madrigal), his ex-wife Angela (Janina Gavankar), and his reluctant star player Brandon (Brandon Currett). The film was written by Brady Ingelsby, the creator of the celebrated HBO series Mare of Eastown , and directed by Gavin O'Connor, who is best known for his uplifting underdog sports classics such as Miracle (2004) and Warrior (2011) and previously worked with Affleck on The Accountant.

The Way Back has recently become a streaming hit on Amazon Prime Video after a brief theatrical run during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Way Back was positively reviewed by critics for the most part, earning an 84% critic score and audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Although The Way Back is not a true story , Affleck was outspoken upon the film's release about his own battle with alcoholism and how that experience inspired some of the qualities of his character. The powerful film is as much about mourning, grief, and substance abuse as it is about basketball, taking a darker spin on the traditional sports team underdog story.

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Another round is an oscar-winning film with similar themes to ben affleck's the way back, both follow employees at a high school who are drinking on the job.

Both films were released in 2020 and are also both available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, making Another Round the perfect follow-up movie for fans of The Way Back.

Another Round shares many of the same themes of alcohol abuse as The Way Back . Interestingly, both films were released in 2020 and are also both available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, making Another Round the perfect follow-up movie for fans of The Way Back . Both films also take place at a high school, since Affleck's Jack becomes the head basketball coach of a Catholic high school in California called Bishop Hayes, while Another Round centers on a group of high school teachers in Copenhagen, Denmark. Another Round also carries a more lighthearted overall tone than The Way Back .

Another Round stars Mads Mikkelsen as Martin, one of a group of high school teachers who irresponsibly experiments with the unproven theory that a moderate daily dose of alcohol improves one's personal, social, and professional lives. While this theory works in some ways and fails in many more, Another Round introduces an intriguing concept around alcohol abuse that opens up a wider conversation. Another Round was written by Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm and directed by Vinterberg, both of whom collaborated with Mikkelsen on The Hunt (2012). Another Round won Best International Feature at the 2021 Academy Awards.

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How the way back & another round each convey alcohol abuse, martin in another round is not drowning himself in his sorrows.

The Way Back explores alcoholism as a means of numbing oneself after an unthinkable tragedy, while Another Round more playfully questions the legitimacy of laws and conventions that chastise daily alcohol use.

The Way Back explores alcoholism as a means of numbing oneself after an unthinkable tragedy, while Another Round more playfully questions the legitimacy of laws and conventions that chastise daily alcohol use. Another Round certainly doesn't reach its conclusion without bouts of tragedy based on the main characters' persistent abuse of alcohol, but it offers an interesting dialogue about the cunning nature of alcohol and its emotionally lubricating effects along the way. Martin in Another Round is not drowning himself in his sorrows as Affleck's Jack is in The Way Back .

At the end of The Way Back , Jack is able to make a serious effort at rehabilitation after losing his position as the head coach of the basketball team. In the interest of avoiding spoilers for Another Round , Martin is confronted with challenges and repercussions from his alcohol consumption but also romanticizes his experience throughout the film, creating a complex and fascinating narrative. Both films maturely handle the sensitive subject matter with awareness and responsibility. Another Round , however, goes a step further to create a more unique perspective on not only alcohol abuse but also life in a broader sense.

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Why another round has better reviews than the way back, another round takes the way back's themes and excels on all levels.

Another Round prevails in being a more high-concept film with much to discover in its rich characters, story, and themes.

The Way Back earned an 84% on Rotten Tomatoes, while Another Round scored an impressive 93%. Affleck offers a great and convincing performance as the lead in The Way Back , although some critics noted that the story was a bit too conventional and full of safe genre tropes , which prevented the film from becoming anything more than a very good movie. Another Round , on the other hand, prevails in being a more high-concept film with much to discover in its rich characters, story, and themes. It takes the common theme of The Way Back and excels on all levels, which is likely what inspired Leonardo DiCaprio to remake Another Round , with Chris Rock set to direct.

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The way back.

The Way Back stars Ben Affleck as Jack Cunningham, a depressed alcoholic who is offered a job coaching his former school's basketball team. As his work with the team begins to improve his life, Jack is also forced to confront his past demons, leading to disastrous consequences. Al Madrigal, Michaela Watkins, and Janina Gavankar also star.

Director Gavin O'Connor

Release Date March 6, 2020

Studio(s) Warner Bros. Pictures

Distributor(s) Warner Bros. Pictures

Writers Brad Ingelsby, Gavin O'Connor

Cast Chris Bruno, Christine Horn, Caleb Thomas, Jayne Taini, Marlene Forte, Da'Vinchi, Rachael Carpani, T.K. Carter, Lukas Gage, Melvin Gregg, Al Madrigal, Hayes MacArthur, Janina Gavankar, Ben Affleck

Runtime 115 minutes

Genres Drama, sport

Budget $25 million

‘Hypnotic’ Review: Ben Affleck Neo-Noir Is a Snooze That Draws From ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Inception’

Robert Rodriguez’s crime caper is exhaustingly over-plotted and surprisingly short on fun

When it comes to the films we associate him with, a lot has changed since the ‘90s when Robert Rodriguez was among the most exciting indie names in cinema with the inventive likes of “El Mariachi,” “From Dusk Till Dawn” and the best segment of the “Four Rooms” anthology. He now has several “Spy Kids” movies, high-profile music videos and middling efforts like “Alita: Battle Angel” under his belt, though this critic can’t help but think of him as the same scrappy independent auteur of decades past in search of a meaty, inventive story.

Which is why the Ben Affleck-starring “Hypnotic” looked and sounded exciting, at least on paper, signaling a brainy yet accessible neo-noir detective tale with an original Rodriguez spin. Sadly, the film is a tedious and erratically cut caper, whose shape-shifting story feels like an uneven and over-plotted rehash of various recognizable films that we’ve seen before.

“Hypnotic” follows the gloomy Austin detective Danny Rourke (an unremarkable Affleck) who is grieving the mysterious disappearance of his young daughter, Minnie. The incident, replayed for us in tired slow-mo flashbacks, is nothing short of freaky. Watching his daughter play within his eyesight, Danny gets distracted for just a second, long enough for a stranger to abduct her. We learn the suspect was been caught, but no trace of the little girl was ever discovered.

We absorb all this at the start of the film as Danny seems to be at a routine therapist appointment. “Hypnotic” briefly gets more interesting in its next sequence, when a bank robber (a menacing William Fichtner) orchestrates a robbery using nothing but his hypnotizing powers to control people’s minds. Chaos reigns in the streets of Austin, with people inexplicably removing their clothes in public, committing gruesome suicides and obeying whatever this insidious man curses them to do. Watching the action from a van, Danny finally barges into the bank and finds various clues to solve the puzzle, one of which reads, “Find Lev Dellrayne” on a polaroid photo of his daughter.

But is any of this real?

According to Rodriguez himself, who screened the film as a work-in-progress in this year’s SXSW film festival, there are Hitchcock inspirations throughout “Hypnotic.” Except, you will be hard pressed to detect that connection anywhere other than the film’s single-word title that nods to the likes of “Vertigo” and “Spellbound.” Instead, get ready for an endless spectacle of homages to movies like “The Matrix,” “Inception,” “Memento,” “Edge of Tomorrow” and “Shutter Island;” all tales of forlorn men in search of answers to make sense of their collapsing worlds of frequently changing realities.

“Hypnotic” reveals secret after secret until they become near-impossible to bother with, yet the story is quite high concept and reliant on noir tropes. Rodriguez liberally draws something out of all of the aforesaid films, but dismisses their crucial world building and character development in the story, written jointly by Rodriguez and Max Borenstein. In that regard, it often feels like the filmmaker has just thrown the viewer into a rough draft of something with incessantly morphing ideas, as well as cheap-looking effects and visuals.

“Hypnotic” is one of those films that is impossible to write about without spoiling, so those who want to go into it fresh: stop reading now. For the rest, there are various Russian Doll-style realities-within-realities inside Rodriguez’s messy concept, and the definition of reality in this story depends on what level of the truth you’re in at any given moment. (So far, so Christopher Nolan.)

In any case, Danny gets a taste of a version of these realities during a session with the gifted psychic Diana Cruz (Alice Braga). She drops several words and theories into their conversation: things like “hypnotic” (a mind-controlling person), “construct” (a makeshift physical world that shows you something other than the truth), and “Domino,” which is…who knows? Who cares?

The deeper Rodriguez goes into the rabbit hole of questions, steering the tale further away from a grieving dad, the less interesting “Hypnotic” becomes, presenting us a world where everyone either possesses some kind of mind-bending power and/or conceals something.

It doesn’t help that Rodriguez’s film looks clumsily DIY (especially with an elaborate set-piece in Mexico that repurposes an “Alita” location), but the real issue is the speed in which the filmmaker moves through the tale. Along the way, he seems to have forgotten to give us reasons to care about Danny’s fight in a film that tries too hard to feel cool, but ultimately lacks depth, unlike the movies that seem to have inspired him.

In the end, when “Hypnotic” finally discloses all its answers and hints at a sequel no one is asking for (let’s hope), you might be surprised by your own emotional indifference towards the resolution. What might even be more surprising is how little fun there is to be had in a film that ought to spellbind the viewer through a cheeky adventure. Instead, the whole affair just feels like a bumpy theme park ride that spits one out after a series of awkward and uncomfortably dizzying twists and turns.