Film Review: Deep Water explores psychological warfare and infidelity
Deep Water: a decidedly sinister thriller
★★★★☆
(15A) stars Ben Affleck as Vic, the uxorious husband of the mercurial Melinda (Ana de Armas), a woman who believes that Vic’s objections to her frequent infidelities are just another manifestation of his boring personality.
When Melinda introduces her latest toy-boy Joel (Brendan Miller), Vic calmly tells Joel that he killed Melinda’s most recent ‘friend’. True or not, the threat soon gains currency in their social circle; and when yet another ‘friend’ of Melinda’s goes missing, the aspiring crime novelist Don (Tracy Letts) starts investigating the possibility that Vic is a killer. The fact that Vic keeps a vast aquarium full of snails will alert thriller fans to the fact that is adapted from a novel by Patricia Highsmith (who herself kept snails as pets), and Adrian Lyne’s film proceeds along the lines typical of Highsmith story, as a pair of damaged individuals wage increasingly vicious psychological warfare.
The sheer number of Melinda’s infidelities is rather improbable but otherwise Ana de Armas is in brilliantly sultry form as the femme fatale, a woman who has no fear of her allegedly homicidal husband because she’s the woman he’s killing for.
Vic, meanwhile, is a complex blend of affable bonhomie and murderous instincts, with Ben Affleck neatly combining the brooding and the brutality his character requires. Adrian Lyne made his reputation as the director of the domestic noirs and , but is a less lurid and decidedly more sinister thriller about the prosaic flaws and all-too-human faults that can compel ordinary people to kill for love.
(Amazon Prime)
