Review: Deep Water

Image courtesy of Hulu.

 
I'm possibly in the minority - based upon some of the other reviews I've seen - but I found Adrian Lyne's "Deep Water," the director's first in about 20 years and based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, to be an amusingly lurid piece of entertainment. It may occasionally border on the ridiculous - and I'm particularly thinking of a deux ex machina that saves the film's anti-hero from a prying enemy near the picture's end - but it's the type of naughty thriller that was once prevalent, but has mostly disappeared.

The film follows the love/hate relationship between Vic (Ben Affleck), a wealthy programmer of drones, and Melinda (Ana de Armas), his promiscuous wife whose love affairs carried out right in front of her husband's face may or may not be some sort of twisted game that the two play. During the course of the picture, this dynamic spirals out of control as Vic begins to get vengeance on Melinda's suitors - and there are many - all the while trying to keep out of the clutches of the police and a nosy true crime author (Tracy Letts) who has landed in Vic's orbit.

Although he started out as the director of the disturbed youth drama "Foxes" before graduating to the smash dance movie "Flashdance," Lyne later became known for being a director of sexy thrillers such as 
"Fatal Attraction," "9 1/2 Weeks" and "Unfaithful," which was his last film before this one. My personal favorite Lyne picture, the hallucinatory "Jacob's Ladder," bore little in common with his other work.

"Deep Water," on the other hand, bears everything in resemblance to his previous films, namely being a sultry thriller about a guy who gets in over his head due to the femme fatale - in this case, his wife - who leads him astray. Is a story like this one, perhaps, a bit dated and out of touch with modern sensibilities? Well, yeah. On the other hand, actually being offensive would require a level of seriousness to which this film is obviously not intending to commit.

If you've ever wanted to see Affleck play a seething husband who bumps off his wife's numerous lovers - who vary from a guy trying to save world hunger to a model-looking piano player - and, in his spare time, tends to a greenhouse full of snails over which he is very protective, then this is the movie for you. There's actually a scene in which suspense is built over whether one of Melinda's lovers will try to cook some of the snails for dinner.

But what keeps the picture from declining in quality is the glossy camerawork, committed performances from its cast (Affleck has rarely been funnier) and its tongue-in-cheek delivery. Rather than smoldering as previous Lyne films have done, this one wears its absurdity like a badge of honor. And it's all the better for it. No, "Deep Water" isn't exactly a return to form for Lyne, but it's entertaining all the same.