Movie Review: With Hulu’s “Deep Water,” Ben Affleck May Have Drowned the Erotic Thriller Genre for Good

In the 1980s and 90s, director Adrian Lyne made a name for himself with erotic thrillers like 9 ½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, and Indecent Proposal. But with his new film Deep Water (his first movie in 20 years, set to hit Hulu this weekend) starring Ben Affleck, the filmmaker has tried– and spectacularly failed– to recapture that success.

In Deep Water– based on the novel of the same name by author Patricia Highsmith, writer of the classic Strangers On a Train– Affleck plays a wealthy early retiree named Vic Van Allen living in the Deep South with his drunken hot mess of a young wife Melinda (Ana de Armas of Knives Out fame) and their precocious daughter Trixie (newcomer Grace Jenkins). Melinda is flagrantly sleeping around on Vic, but he watches from a distance, seemingly having accepted her infidelities.

We see Melinda cycle through a rotation of boyfriend after boyfriend while the Van Allens attend or host parties seemingly every other day, and Vic’s friends (played by Lil Rel Howery from Get Out, Dash Mihok from Silver Linings Playbook, and Devyn A. Tyler from The Purge) observe that he is being made to look like a fool. But when these boyfriends start disappearing one-by-one, we as the audience are led to believe that Vic is offing them using a variety of methods as revenge (or maybe he isn’t? The movie wants to keep us guessing until the end, but I found it extremely difficult to care either way). Both Vic and Melinda come across as such awful people that it’s pretty tough to get invested in who is wronging whom, and I couldn’t help but feel that the only real victim here is Trixie, who is often left alone with a babysitter or simply forced to listen from the other room while this melodramatic couple has it out time and again.

As the movie’s narrative progressed, I kept trying to guess what Deep Water’s twist ending would be, but I have to hand it to Lyne (and Highsmith’s source material) for out-thinking me completely by not even being interesting enough to have a genuine twist of any kind– except that maybe these two reprobates are made for eachother? There are countless eye-rolling moments in this film– which fortunately runs under two hours, sparing us an overlong visit with this insufferable cast of characters– but nothing tops the beyond-absurd bicycle-vs.-car race through the woods that ostensibly serves as the story’s climax when an understandably suspicious mystery writer (Tracy Letts from Lady Bird) finally figures out what’s really going on. Deep Water was originally planned for a theatrical release under the Disney-owned 20th Century Studios label, but it was delayed several times due to the pandemic, and I’m thinking the powers that be were at long last all too relieved to be able to dump it on a streaming service, despite the star power at its core. This ironically very shallow exercise in inanity is likely only to be remembered as a last gasp from a director who used to be much better at achieving similar goals.

Deep Water will be released this Friday, March 18th, streaming exclusively on Hulu.

My grade: ½ out of 5 bizarrely irrelevant snails

Mike Celestino
Mike serves as Laughing Place's lead Southern California reporter, Editorial Director for Star Wars content, and host of the weekly "Who's the Bossk?" Star Wars podcast. He's been fascinated by Disney theme parks and storytelling in general all his life and resides in Burbank, California with his beloved wife and cats.