Ben Affleck shuffles through the moral murk of "Deep Water" like a man with a minor head injury. But his dead-eyed passivity in the role of Vic Van Allen — a suburban worm who's had just about enough of his young wife's relentless cuckolding — is appropriate for this quietly tormented character. Unfortunately, it gives Affleck little opportunity for emotional expression, so he isn't especially interesting to watch — which allows Ana de Armas, playing the faithless wife, Melinda, to skip away with the picture (much as she did with her scenes as the bubbly butt-kicker in "No Time to Die").
The movie, just released on Hulu after a long theatrical delay, is based on a 1957 novel by Patricia Highsmith, a writer famously uninterested in the sorrows of the human condition. As with other films made from Highsmith books ("The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "Strangers on a Train" among them), the characters here are not very nice people, and not strongly opposed to employing murder as a means of dispute resolution.
Vic Van Allen is not a man much given to disputation to begin with. Melinda's brazen hookups with a succession of local hunks are common knowledge among the couple's friends ("You've gotta rein Melinda in, man," says one of them), but Vic himself, who has been keeping a doleful eye on her for some time, knows about her every fling. He has kept the marriage going, though, with husband and wife sleeping in separate bedrooms and ruling out divorce (possibly because Vic, a retired tech guy, is loaded and would like to stay that way).
Then one of Melinda's paramours, a man named Martin McRae, goes missing, and when Vic finds himself alone with the man's inevitable successor, a blond dummy named Joel (Brendan Miller), he tells him that McRae disappeared because Vic killed him. It's not clear to us that this is true, but Joel believes it and takes off. Later, when Vic encounters an opportunity to actually terminate the next of Melinda's carnal conquests, a local lounge musician named Charlie (Jacob Elordi), he seizes it without thinking twice. Once launched on this lethal path, of course, he finds it very hard to get off.
The movie does build up a sense of unease, but it's never as suspenseful as you might expect, given that the director, Adrian Lyne, is a past master of this sort of "erotic thriller," as the genre was called back in the day. His "Fatal Attraction" was a huge hit in 1987, but his last movie, "Unfaithful," for which Diane Lane won an Oscar nomination, came out 20 years ago. The mechanics of sexy, sweaty tension have evolved since then, so "Deep Water" feels a little dated. (Also, it wasn't all that long ago that Affleck was faced with another set of marital problems in "Gone Girl.")
"Deep Water" is a not-bad genre throwback with few surprises. Although I have to say the prominent place occupied by snails in this story is kind of puzzling. Vic has a thing for the gastropods and collects them in glass tanks in his garage. This struck me as a very odd plot point until I learned that Highsmith herself was a snail-fancier and wrote a couple of short stories in which they featured. The movie, possibly looking for new trails to blaze, gives us a few gooey closeups of snail cuddling, which, as you might imagine, is definitively unerotic.
Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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