*This piece is part of our Critics In Conversation series, where two writers offer different perspectives on the same film. Read Jillian Russell’s review here, and Wesley Stenzel’s review here.*
One of the only interesting lines uttered in Adrian Lyne’s new straight-to-Hulu erotic thriller Deep Water occurs in an early scene. One-time tech entrepreneur Vic Van Allen (Ben Affleck) and his hot, crazy wife Melinda (Ana de Armas) return home late from a party. Melinda spent most of her time there brazenly flirting with another man, and Vic just watched and scowled. By this point we understand that this is something of a loose arrangement between the couple—Vic doesn’t enjoy Melinda’s behavior, but he does tolerate it. This incongruous dynamic makes them both miserable, but as is the case with so many straight couples on screen and in real life, they are apparently incapable of brokering a resolution by just talking a little bit. In fact, it’s probably the frictive pain of irresolution that they both masochistically crave. Whatever the case, dynamics like this generate a lot of tension. Vic lets a little bit out by remarking, “You’re very smart, Melinda.” She says back, “not in a way you respect.”
These lines grant us entry into a familiar world of fraught male-female sexual relations. Seduction, betrayal, distorted projections and bitter recriminations—there’s nothing you’ll see here that you haven’t seen in any other competently assembled erotic thriller, including many of Lyne’s previous films (Unfaithful, Fatal Attraction). Deep Water ultimately measures far below the standard set by those masterpieces, both sensually (the film is ugly to look at and miserable to watch) and cerebrally (despite the pedigree of its source material, a novel by Patricia Highsmith, Sam Levinson and Zach Helm’s screenplay merely digs a shallow grave for Lyne to bury all his stupid ideas in.) But as the film scholar Carol Clover noted in her landmark feminist analysis of the horror genre, Men, Women & Chainsaws, it’s usually the cheap, dirty, and stupid stuff that gives us the most to work with. “If mainstream film detains us with the niceties of plot, character, motivation, cinematography,” she wrote, “low or exploitation horror operates at the bottom line, and in doing so reminds us that every movie has a bottom line, no matter how covert or mystified or sublimated it may be.”
Deep Water may not literally be a low budget movie, but its hand-me-down premise, limp-dick visuals, and bare bones character dynamics make it as easily readable as one. And what Lyne has scrawled onto the bloated corpse of his long-desired return to feature filmmaking about men, women, sex, and marriage is fascinating, if also revolting, and poorly communicated. It’s actually a mistake to read Deep Water as a study of a marriage or of heterosexual dynamics—it is a male fantasy from top to bottom. If you don’t have the stomach to journey into the blackest pit of masculine hysteria, that’s understandable. But if you’re willing to listen, Deep Water can be read as a primal scream of male sexual anxieties that we convinced ourselves had quieted to the point of obsolescence in the era of #MeToo and beta soft boys. But they have not, and through Ben Affleck, our star system’s most potent avatar of humiliated masculinity, we are invited to take them seriously once more.
It is fairly easy to describe what happens in Deep Water. Vic is man with no vibe, no libido, and no chin. He is moderately attractive, though, and does have a ton of money, because he invented the microchip that allows drones to fly around and bomb people. Melinda is beautiful and loves to flirt and have sex more than anything. Definitely more than she likes to take care of their daughter, who I don’t think even has a name, she’s so inconsequential to the story. The film is structured around this central marital dynamic. As Melinda continues to test Vic’s patience and forgiveness by flagrantly cheating on him with younger and hotter men, he grows angrier and more volatile. Images of sexuality and suggestions of violence and death are intermingled with such frequency from the very beginning of Deep Water that it feels practically inevitable that the mounting tension will climax in an orgy of homicidal violence.
If it were made in a different era, it would be clear that this movie is about the unspeakable desire many men have to kill their wives, whether metaphorically or literally. A sexual force as potent and uncontainable as Melinda’s is as rage-inducing as a chaste wife who won’t relent to her husband’s “god-given” right to sexual satisfaction. In other words, men find many reasons to hate the women in their lives. But in the movies of today, the dark convergence of men’s sex drives and death drives is usually sublimated to a point of near incomprehensibility, if it is acknowledged at all. For however boring and annoying Deep Water is, it’s shocking how straightforwardly Lyne was permitted to make his point: that for men like Vic, female sexual autonomy is simply unbearable.
It doesn’t matter that they’re married. Vic’s grievance with Melinda isn’t that she’s transgressing the bonds of matrimony, but that she surpasses the limits of his sexual capacity. “Do you wanna know if I’m fucking him?” Melinda asks after Vic catches her canoodling with a piano-playing Jacob Elordi. “Ask me. Do you wanna know if he makes me cum?” Remember that Melinda is not a real woman; she’s a paranoid male fantasy of a woman. In the context of the film, words like these are escalatory. Lyne includes so many of them because he wants to acclimate us to the “inevitable,” act of retribution against the insubordinate wife, which in a film like Deep Water, has to play out metaphorically and indirectly as the murder of her lover.
But is that what Vic really wants? Is that what men like Lyne and Affleck really want out of their relationships with women? As it is in dreams and fantasies, everything in Deep Water is backwards. In the film, it’s Vic who wants reciprocity, commitment, and perfect happiness, where Melinda wants chaos and disharmony. But in reality, it’s almost always the Melindas who want these things, and the Vics who are so convinced they should want these things that they grow to resent them. After that, it’s impossible to tell whether they really want them or not. So they do insane things like kill their wives, have affairs, and fundraise 50 million dollars and spend three years shooting a movie about a homewrecking female nymphomaniac who pushes her husband to murder, that is actually a thinly veiled fantasy of a woman loving her husband so much, being so devoted to him that she’d force him to kill his competition for her heart.
The male sexual psyche is complex, however much we joke that men “only want one thing.” It seems that Adrian Lyne understands it just as poorly as Ben Affleck’s Vic does. Because of that, Deep Water provides a fascinating, nearly unvarnished glimpse into how men see women, sex, and themselves. But for the same reason, it’s a nearly joyless slog to sit through.