Film Review: "Deep Water" (2022).

"The love story is never the whole story" in Deep Water. This erotic psychological thriller film directed by Adrian Lyne, adapted by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson, and based on the 1957 novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith. The film takes us inside the marriage of picture-perfect Vic and Melinda Van Allen to discover the dangerous mind games they play and what happens to the people that get caught up in them.

In 2013, the project began development with Lyne hired to direct and Fox 2000 Pictures set to finance. The project would mark Lyne's first film since Unfaithful (2002). In 2018, Fox 2000 sold the rights to New Regency. However, the project entered development hell. In August 2019, the project was revived when Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas agreed to star, with Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures agreeing to handle the distribution via their 20th Century Studios label. By early November, Tracy Letts, Lil Rel Howery, Dash Mihok, Finn Wittrock, Kristen Connolly, Jacob Elordi and Rachel Blanchard rounded out the film's cast. At the same time, principal photography commenced and took place throughout New Orleans, Louisiana. The film was originally scheduled for a November 13, 2020 release date, but was delayed to August 13, 2021, and again to January 14, 2022. In early December 2021, it was taken off the release schedule. In mid February 2022, it was announced that the film would be released on Hulu on March 18, 2022 and on Prime Video simultaneously.

The film stars Affleck, de Armas, Letts, Howery, Mihok, Wittrock, Connolly, Elordi and Blanchard.
Sure, Melinda may be little more than a sexy Latin-American housewife but the film is still notable for de Armas' resilient, complex performance. Whether portraying hesitancy, fear, trembling desire or passionate surrender, de Armas is always honest, truthful, and utterly convincing. Affleck anchors the movie: he plays real and he looks real, with just enough lines and hints of wrinkles; a handsome man who's been distracted by too many thoughts of infidelities committed by his wife. Works precisely because it is so upsetting, unusually so for a studio film, and so empathetic for Vic at the hands of her attractive manipulator.

Under the direction of Adrian Lyne, most of the picture's situations seem like randomly chosen place holders, flat events that just fill time until the final bizarre confrontation. While billed as an erotic thriller, the film strictly qualifies as neither, appealing to our prurience, guilt, hatred, and dread. The film is a shameless stew of sensationalist effects, destined to give the appearance of a movie to its absolute emptiness. The film is called Deep Water, but it's actually anything but -- to the adultery movie rulebook, anyway. Until it goes berserk in the last reel or so, the film is an absorbing drama of civilized adultery that gets less civilized as it goes on to its inevitable conclusion. This is not a great movie, and so many of the things being written about it are just plain sexually vacant.

Simon says Deep Water receives: