Director: Adrian Lyne
Starring: Ben Affleck, Ana de Armas
Year: 2022
When is a sexy thriller neither sexy nor thrilling? When is a psychological drama neither psychological or dramatic? When it’s Deep Water, the answer is Deep Water, a point to you if you guessed Deep Water. This genre blob deserves to be wiped off with a napkin, not soaked up by Hulu audiences like it’s actually a film worth remarking upon, and I’m angry at the fact that I feel like I have to do so, now that I’ve watched it and it has, eww, gotten on me. While we’re at it, let’s wash this film from our collective memories, because it’s giving us nothing, and it’s making an already-awful genre look even worse.
Vic is a very wealthy man, having developed a microchip for drones that helps the government track our enemies and eliminate them. A bit of a gray moral area, but Vic enjoys his financial success, dabbling in art and photography and magazine editing and mountain bike riding; basically spending his time casually. Meanwhile, his young, extremely gorgeous wife Melinda is enjoying her time casually too, sleeping around with young men, or so it appears. And *they* seem to *dis*appear, oddly enough, with Vic joking that he’s killed them; haha, very funny. But, I mean, …has he?
At first it appears that Deep Water is just another middle-aged, book-club, guilty-pleasure, slightly-sensual novel-turned-film, and that’s fine, that’s a genre, albeit a dumb one. And this movie does fit that category, and I guess some people will stream it, find it thrilling, and go to bed happy. But, under the surface, this is an extremely poorly made piece of work, a real mess of a movie, and something that we ought to be better than. It’s so badly written as to be insulting, the characters make no sense, the plot is pitiful, and the ending should make us weep over the two hours of our lives that we lost. Deep Water is trivium, amateurish trivium at that, and everyone involved should be embarrassed. It’s not sexy, it does not suck audiences in, and it will not fulfill whatever hole Gone Girl-style flicks usually fill or Fatal Attraction-esque noirs typically satisfy; it’s just plain awful.
My rating: ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆