Movie Review: 'Deep Water' is a Dreary 'Erotic' Thriller

Hey, you know who doesn’t need a comeback right now? Director Adrian Lyne. No time in our collective popular culture could be any less suited for the kind of sleazy, sexist, trope heavy sex thriller that Lyne specialized in in the 1980s. While his Fatal Attraction is certainly an unforgettable movie, it was also an ugly, misogynistic, chauvinistic, sleazefest that blamed men’s infidelity on these predatory women always out to turn good men into cheaters.

In Lyne’s anachronistic worldview, men are slaves to their libido and women are eager con-artists aiming to use sexual pleasure to control the minds and wallets of powerful men. Don’t be mistaken, there is plenty of room for villainous female characters but you have to make their villainy specific and the character memorable, just as you would for a male character, oddly enough, for that kind of thing to not feel like some sexist fantasy of good men and evil women.

For instance, David Fincher managed to direct Gone Girl without making Rosamund Pike into some kind of statement on predatory women. She was a psycho-murderer but she was specific in what motivated her. She was a villain but she had her reasons to be a villain, even if you didn’t care for what those reasons were. Pike’s character represented a class of women who felt victimized by the carelessness of men and her vengeance, while appalling, was in many ways a catharsis for women who would prefer not to become killers of men, but didn’t mind the voyeuristic thrill of seeing a woman outsmart and punish the men who aimed to victimize her.

Adrian Lyne, of course, is not David Fincher. Fincher worked with Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn to flesh out the character and worked with Rosamund Pike to invest the character with a twisted genius that you feel guilty for admiring. It’s a trick that doesn’t work on all audiences but it certainly worked on me, Gone Girl remains an all time favorite for me. Adrian Lyne lacks the thoughtful process of Fincher and where Fincher used a scalpel, Lyne uses a machete to craft broad, silly, caricatures of evil women out to make men do terrible things.

That’s a rather lengthy way of saying that I don’t care for the new thriller, Deep Water starring Ben Affleck and Ana De Armas. This retro-thriller feels like something Lyne might have made back in the 1980s. That’s not a compliment. This isn’t delightfully retro, it’s a the same tropes Lyne rehashed for years about the ways women cause men to do terrible things in order to maintain their sexual dominance over a woman.

In Deep Water Ben Affleck stars as Vic Van Allen, a tech bro who made millions on drone technology. Vic is married, quite unhappily, to a much younger woman, Melinda (Ana De Armas), who delights in emasculating him by cheating on him at the dozens of rich people parties they attend to spend the too much money they have on champagne, drugs, and being attractive. Vic pretends not to be jealous, he tries to come off as cool and aloof, but the mask is slipping.

Recently, one of the men his wife was possibly sleeping with has gone missing. When a new boyfriend emerges, Vic uses the missing man and that man’s relationship with his wife as a warning to the new guy. Lather, rinse, repeat. This plot runs through the entirety of Deep Water where Affleck threatens one new boy-toy after another and they end up dead in suspicious fashion. Of course, it’s not Vic’s fault, it’s his wife’s fault.

By the logic of Adrian Lyne, and far too many other men in the world, women are all crazy, manipulative, sex mad fiends aiming to destroy the lives upstanding men. Using sex, women drive men to crazed extremes of violence and treachery for the sake of landing back in bed with them. There are other women in Deep Water besides Ana De Armas’s treacherous, drunken, young wife but they are scripted about as well as your average NPC in a video game, providing brief expository cut scenes.

No, the only real women who exist and have something to say or do in Adrian Lyne's world are the women who drive men crazy with sex. Women who turn men into cuckolds, and emasculate them. Masculinity must be protected at all cost in the world of Adrian Lyne and simply getting a divorce like a reasonable person in a toxic relationship, doesn’t do enough to protect a man who has been humiliated sexually by losing his wife to another man. Masculinity must be protected with violence while sex is reclaimed through fear of violence.

What Ben Affleck saw in this movie is beyond me. He looks miserable throughout the whole film as if every scene were a chore. He appears disinterested and by extension, we feel apathetic toward him and the rest of the movie. Ana De Armas is unpredictable and energetic but the script just keeps having her do the same things over and over again to ever lessening effect. De Armas is a brilliant actress who deserves far better than to play your typically sexed up thriller vixen from the 80s.

Adrian Lyne is an anachronism as is the kind of ‘erotic’ thriller he used to make to please horny dads on Cinemax. Deep Water is not a reminder of a director who used to craft masterful and sexy thriller plots. Rather, Deep Water exposes the core of Lyne’s work that has always been a cesspool of male victim fantasies about dangerous women who use sex or the promise of sex to turn good men bad.

For those looking to be as miserable as Ben Affleck appears to be in this movie. Deep Water debuts on Hulu on Friday, March 18th, 2022.