After a twenty year absence Adrian Lyne has returned to filmmaking. Deep Water (2022) is nowhere near Lyne’s masterpiece, Jacob’s Ladder (1990), but it never pretends to be. What Lyne delivers is a slow burning thriller more focused on escalating tension than cheap thrills and scares. Deep Water is more like the dark erotic dramas of the eighties and nineties when producer Zalman King packed cinemas with sexually charged spectacles.
Deep Water is about a couple, Vic (Ben Affleck) and Melinda (Ana de Armas), whose open marriage is more complex than it seems. They keep their arrangement a secret from their friends even though Melinda parades her steady stream of boy-toys around for all to see. But Vic is a cuckold only in appearance. It is never too long before Melinda’s fellas disappear or are found dead.
Lyne approaches the material with a workman-like precision, crafting a taut narrative around suspicion and plot twists. The final conceit is that Melinda, in some indescribably way, gets off on her husband murdering her lovers. With both husband and wife complicit in murder the power plays in the marriage are equalized. It’s a notion that in Lyne’s heyday as a director would have been almost unimaginable in a mainstream movie.
Deep Water isn’t an amazing film. It’s a film out of time; as if a picture from the mid-nineties had been magically thrust forward some twenty-five years. In Deep Water there is a leisurely pace to character development and a sense that details are to be very gradually reveled. The essence of Lyne’s approach is itself counter to almost all of the impulses that drive contemporary Hollywood cinema.
All of this has had the effect of isolating younger audiences. The film centered social media platform Letterboxd gives Deep Water a user rating of 2.4 stars. User reviews on the platform criticize the film as being “unsexy” and “unerotic”. The slowly building narrative of Deep Water has more in common with the highly rated Eyes Wide Shut (1999) than it does with the moderately rated Nightmare Alley (2021).
Deep Water is a throwback made by a filmmaker who hasn’t worked in two decades so the parameters of a critique must account for that. The question must first be whether or not Deep Water is relevant today, not if it conforms to audiences’ preconceived notions. Almost unfortunately, in a disturbing way Deep Water is rather timely.
