Mark Reviews Movies: DEEP WATER (2022)

Deep Water, Hulu

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 17, 2022

Director Adrian Lyne's Deep Water comes from the 1957 novel by Patricia Highsmith, that most sinister writer of thrillers. Highsmith's work is often defined by a dark and cynical view of people. Anyone can kill, she frequently seems to argue, as long as a person believes oneself to be in possession of a good enough reason. There's something bluntly casual and discomfortingly honest in that understanding.

Here, the story revolves around a man, married to a woman who may or may not be—but probably is—having affairs with other men, who may or may not care about the extramarital sex his wife is having. If he doesn't care, that's the end of this story, obviously, so when we realize that Vic (Ben Affleck) is concerned with the possibility that his wife is carrying on romances with other men right in front of him and their friends, the question shifts. Indeed, another possibility quickly emerges: Vic may or may not be capable of murdering a man who has or wants to have sex with his wife Melinda (Ana de Armas).

The fascinating thing about Zach Helm and Sam Levinson's screenplay is that it doesn't leave us questioning what Vic can and will do for long. A lesser or more predictable movie might have taken Melinda's perspective, as she tries to investigate and determine what her husband has done or didn't do. It would be a straightforward mystery, and the suspense would be born out of the question, the potential, and the likely consequences of the husband's guilt.

Like Highsmith, though, Lyne's film is more intrigued by the questions raised from a direct answer. We essentially know the kind of man Vic is from the start, even if he says otherwise, occasionally seems to be a completely different way, and jokes about or justifies the things that might point someone in the right direction. Once we know for certain—and that certainty arrives almost immediately after the first crime within this story has been committed—of Vic's character, a world of other queries and eventual truths about this man, as well as this marriage, reveals itself.

Vic is quiet and subdued, spending his time riding his bike, spending time with friends, caring after his daughter Trixie (Grace Jenkins), and tending to a collection of snails (slimy on the inside, with a tough shell on the outside—an apt enough metaphor). He's well-liked within the small community, and a lot of people are impressed that a man of his age is already retired.

By the way, Vic invented a computer chip that has come to be used in drones—specifically for military operations. Nobody thinks much of this, except for Don (Tracy Letts), a writer and relative newcomer to town, who suggests that, on at least a moral or ethical level, Vic is already a killer. The quick way he rationalizes and deflects that logic suggests Vic has considered the idea.

The conversation goes to that possibility on account of Vic making a "joke" to one of Melinda's close "friends," a musician named Joel (Brendan Miller), who spends most of a party running off and hiding with Vic's wife. Melinda, who sleeps in a separate bedroom from Vic, once had another friend like the young man, and he disappeared. Vic tells the new friend that he murdered that guy. The rumors start swirling, and while everyone thinks the joke was in bad taste, no one believes Vic could have killed anyone. When Melinda finds a new "friend" in pianist Charlie (Jacob Elordi) and keeps him a secret from Vic, that belief is tested.

Charlie does end up dead—drowned in a pool at another party. While everyone assumes it's an accident, Melinda accuses Vic of murdering the man to the police, and with an equally suspicious Don's help, she hires someone to look into her husband.

There isn't much of a mystery to this story, and that's part of the reason the film works as well as it does, on a level that's more engaging and unsettling than a traditional murder mystery or thriller might have been. The clues—more like the answers, really—are there from the start, essentially. They're in the two-faced nature of Vic—how he acts nonchalant about his wife's assorted "friendships" in public but makes private, if deniable, threats to the men—and the dispassionate way he doesn't accept Don's moral challenge about his invention. Beyond that, there's the icy chill of Affleck's performance, which seems to be giving too much away when the plot is still establishing its premise and stakes, but is exactly as cold and calculated as it needs to be for the story that's actually being told here.

We know the answer, almost as soon as the death or murder occurs. From there, the filmmakers and Affleck unravel these layers of performance and deception, as well as the deeper levels of insecurity that seem to be driving this man toward one act—and then to another and another (The climactic bit of someone uncovering all of this does become a bit too convenient, leading to an almost comical tortoise-and-hare chase that turns a clever character into a frantic idiot).

This isn't a one-sided character study, though, and there's a genuine uneasiness in how Melinda reveals her own insecurities and what she wants from her husband as her suspicions of Vic increase and become clearer. If Deep Water is cynical about the capacity for murder, it is also and equally scathing about the underlying drives, desires, and needs of love and marriage. That's the mystery the film really wants to explore, and its discoveries are both cruel and pathetic.

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