It was this erotic-psychological thriller and the first film made by the British Adrian Lyne after a full two-decade hiatus. This filmmaker was at his creative peak in the eighties and nineties, when such erotic thrillers were punched in bulk, and it was Lyne who was among the most deserving for the rise of this subgenre. Suffice it to say “9 and a half weeks”, and with the exception of the cult horror-thriller “Jacob’s Ladder” and the rest of his filmography (Indecent Proposal, Fatal Attraction, Unfaithful) mostly falls on films loaded with erotica and sex. That’s why “Deep Water” may have not only aesthetically, but also thematically a retro style from the 80’s and 90’s, and on the theme of infidelity, jealousy, this film seems to continue where Lyne left off at the beginning of the century with “The Unfaithful”.
In that film, Daine Lane was the unfaithful wife who cheated on Richard Gere’s husband with the younger Frenchman Olivier Martinez, and in “Deep Water” it is again the woman who paints and catches the curves. From the beginning, it is clear to us that the marriage of retired tech developer Victor (Ben Affleck) and the much younger Melinda (Ana de Armas) is unusual to say the least. Handsome and seductive Melinda does not hesitate to flirt with other guys in front of her husband, even bring them home, and although it is clear that she is boiling inside, Victor can stand it. For some incomprehensible reason, the jealous and angry Victor does not want to divorce his wife, who is obviously cheating on him with whomever he arrives at, and she also stays married for some obscure reason.
One of the reasons why they don’t break up is certainly their daughter Trixie, and as time goes on, it seems more and more that Victor’s behavior like this excites Victor at least as much as it makes him jealous and angry. But practically right at the beginning of the film, we find out that one of Melinda’s lovers has disappeared, and in order to scare the handsome young man his wife is currently flirting with, Victor will tell him that he killed him. The very next day Victor claims he was joking, but now you know if it was really a joke or the man was serious, and with his statement the whole action was pushed and we will have to wait until the end to get answers to what is really happening.
All the more so because Vic’s words were also believed by his neighbor, the writer Don (Tracy Letts), who is convinced that Vic could be a murderer, and it seems that this could motivate his new novel. All the more so because Vic seems somehow cold, distant, and one can sense that he got rich by creating drones to kill people, so this may suggest that human lives mean very little to him. He acts from start to finish “Deep Water” extremely paranoid, mysterious, and Affleck is in solid form as the guy a woman constantly cheats on while he seemingly stoically puts up with it and pretends it’s all right. The screenplay, based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1957 novel Strangers on a Train, Mr. Ripley, was written by Zach Helm (Stranger than Fiction) and old Barry’s son Sam Levinson (Euphoria), and was an interesting thriller about the dark human side, obsession. , paranoia, sexual tension and probably the swan song of a director who marked an era. Rating 7/10.
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