“Deep waters”: why does the long-awaited thriller with Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas fail?

Few retired millionaires have it as bad as Vic (Ben Affleck), the protagonist of “Deep Waters”, the new thriller that Prime Video has just released and whose main commercial hook is the romance that its main actors starred in. Indeed, the also director of “Argo” had a short, but media idyll Ana de Armas, 16 years younger than him. All this, before giving himself a second chance with the even more famous, Jennifer Lopez.

Directed by Adrian Lyne, this film is an adaptation of the novel of the same name published by Patricia Highsmith in 1957. The plot, in general, goes as follows: Vic and his wife Melinda have a highly complex marriage. They have a daughter (Trixie/Grace Jenkins) and live in the same house, but both have an unspoken agreement about sexuality. She has the freedom to go out and sleep with the man she wants.

Profiled as a woman as sensual as she is independent, Melinda prefers young and handsome. On the other hand, although Vic is good looking, his introverted personality and his reserved character distance him a bit from the opposite sex, with few exceptions (two friends’ wives flirt with him). Although none of the latter manages to transcend because sexually he only wants his wife.

Although Vic seems to fulfill that tacit agreement with Melinda, the truth is that with each of his new lovers he ends up swamped by jealousy. When young Joel Dash (Brendan Miller) shows up, he manages to frighten him by telling him — in total cold blood — that he killed Malcolm McRae, a friend of his recently deceased wife. The problem comes when this “sinister joke” seems to come true and his wife’s new affairs begin to appear dead.

If the first shot of this film has to do with the criminal, the second is clearly linked to the sentimental/affective. “Deep waters” shows a couple in crisis. Melinda is clearly not happy with the life she leads. Her monogamy strikes him as an old-fashioned and boring concept. On the other side, Vic struggles to steer his family toward what his wife hates. He does household chores (from washing dishes to feeding his daughter to taking care of her snail collection) with enviable calm. The counterpoint in ways of seeing married life reaches its climax one night when she arrives very late and they argue loudly. After he rebukes her for her new lover, she blurts out the phrase:

– “We have a daughter, a family”

– “That was your choice!”, she replies.

Happily, “Deep Waters” is not the story of a man and his wife fighting, and the latter’s lovers circulating night after night (before they are killed). There is something else. Adrian Lyne’s film has environments. The clearest is that of family friends. Men (Grant, Jeff and more) willing to drop their most witty jokes that, unfortunately, fail to fix Vic’s frown. But there is also a character who makes his way in a particular way: Don Wilson (Tracy Letts). He is the oldest of the couple’s group of acquaintances. We are facing a not very famous writer of short stories and scripts who from the beginning saw the character played by Ben Affleck as “weird” and suspicious, to say the least.

“Except for the good chemistry between Affleck and De Armas, the plot lacks a certain order that makes it easier to understand.”

Outside this environment there are a series of small details that if one begins to analyze, one never fully understands their presence in the film. From the already mentioned snails. Two hours of film are not enough to understand the metaphor of this resource. Vic raises them with dedication, protects them and observes them as a fetish. After this we could talk about his bicycle, an element that the protagonist uses from beginning to end. To relax and even to go to kill, all with an inexplicable ease. Beyond the close-ups of his face exhausted by hours of pedaling, and how strange it is to see a strong man like Ben Affleck mounted on such a light device, how did it change that Vic’s vehicle was a bicycle and not a motorcycle or a Ferrari?

Is “Deep Waters” an erotic thriller? Certainly yes. There’s a series of crimes that come out of nowhere (although nobody seems too concerned about solving them) and also a torrid sexual journey starring Melinda, her husband, and her lovers. Special mention deserves the good direction of Adrian Lyne, a director who moved away from his work for a couple of decades after achieving well-remembered films such as “Fatal Attraction” in 1987 and “An Indecent Proposal” in 1993.

What would be the most accurate balance for a proposal like this? The first thing that should be said is that, except for the good chemistry between Affleck and De Armas, the plot lacks a certain order that makes it easier to understand. The presence of Vic’s friends throwing endless jokes on the air is simply unnecessary. Although the story requires a Don Wilson searching for the truth behind so many deaths, the truth is that the character played by Tracy Letts appears, disappears and reappears in an at times inexplicable sequence. Bonus track: almost out of nowhere we see a detective who, quickly discovered by Vic, disappears just as quickly.

We started this comment talking about the curiosity generated by seeing Ben Affleck act alongside Ana de Armas. “Deep waters”, in that sense, fulfills the purpose of showing the extremely natural chemistry between a couple that came to captivate Hollywood at the time. Beyond that, and although it has an ending that lifts thanks to the talent of Tracy Letts, this erotic thriller will definitely not be positioned among the best in the repertoire of a filmmaker of the stature of Adrian Lyne.

THE TOKEN:

Synopsis: A well-to-do husband who allows his wife to have affairs to avoid divorce becomes the prime suspect in the disappearance of his lovers.

Original title: “Deep Water”

Duration: 115 minutes

Classification: +18 years

Gender: thriller

Rating: ★★

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