Deep Water (2022)
Directed by Adrian Lyne
A well-to-do husband who allows his wife to have affairs in order to avoid a divorce becomes a prime suspect in the disappearance of her lovers.
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41 films that influenced Deep Water
What critics say influenced Deep Water
Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat may have codified onscreen sex (not to mention the “erotic thriller” template) for normies in 1981, but Lyne’s Flashdance , 9 ½ Weeks , and Fatal Attraction were important cultural flash points that not only attracted audiences in droves but inspired a host of imitators of their grown-up content and muscular visual language.
It’s possible, while streaming “Deep Water,” to feel a stab of nostalgia for the big-screen heyday of the Hollywood erotic thriller, a genre to which Lyne and several others — the Lawrence Kasdan of “Body Heat” and the Paul Verhoeven of “Basic Instinct” among them — made indelibly sweaty contributions in the ’80s and ’90s.
The would-be mastermind who’s nowhere as smart as he thinks he is has long been a staple of the noir murder mystery, with Double Indemnity and Body Heat being classics of the genre.
Lyne, who’s also directed films like 9 ½ Weeks , Fatal Attraction , and Indecent Proposal , is known for his sexy stories, and there was an expectation that this film would be in the same vein.
Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat may have codified onscreen sex (not to mention the “erotic thriller” template) for normies in 1981, but Lyne’s Flashdance , 9 ½ Weeks , and Fatal Attraction were important cultural flash points that not only attracted audiences in droves but inspired a host of imitators of their grown-up content and muscular visual language.
The lack of graphic intimacy between Vic and Melinda feels like a surprising artistic direction from Lyne after Unfaithful , 9½ Weeks , and Fatal Attraction , and combined with the lacklustre screenplay, it prevents audiences from believing them as a couple.
Lyne’s most famous film, Fatal Attraction (1987), wrote the book on the modern sexual thriller, and his last film, Unfaithful (2002), continued familiar themes of infidelity and murderous female sexuality.
Also, “Deep Water” marks a return to sexy noir material for Adrian Lyne, who directed “9 ½ Weeks,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Indecent Proposal,” “Lolita” and “Unfaithful” but hasn’t made a film in 20 years.
In the 1990s and early 2000s the English director Adrian Lyne was one of the masters of the erotic thriller, the craftsman behind such suspenseful yet deeply silly entertainments as 9½ Weeks , Fatal Attraction , Indecent Proposal , and Unfaithful .
Lyne’s latest evokes David Cronenberg’s Crash and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread , the latter less explicit than the former, but the key to unlocking both is whether or not you can accept that this dynamic, dysfunctional, fucked-up or distasteful as it may be, works for these characters .
No, they're for brooding, and Vic's hobby of snail care is meant to give him a dark, mysterious side, but all it ends up drawing is parallels to Willem Dafoe's character's fondness for leeches in "Speed 2: Cruise Control."
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Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut .
Going in with this knowledge feels like a pleasing secret after the fact: the equivalent of watching Eyes Wide Shut ’s scenes of sexual dislocation knowing that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were about to divorce, a sort of unwanted tabloid interference lurking in your subconscious.
That Affleck and Armas briefly dated following the filming of "Deep Water" makes the "Eyes Wide Shut" comparisons inevitable; that this is another film mis-marketed as an erotic thriller, despite being a darker comedy about male sexual insecurity, only heightens the similarities.
With its troubled marriage and threatened masculinity of its main character, it’s clear the director wanted to make his answer to Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut .
It’s hardly Eyes Wide Shut or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but the central dynamic makes sense.
"Deep Water" is an epic fail when compared to the classic 1957 novel by the late, great Patricia Highsmith, who wrote "Strangers On a Train," "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and other crime fiction that tackled obsession with an existential dread that evoked -- no kidding -- Dostoevsky.
Deep Water is based on the 1957 novel by Patricia Highsmith, whose work has inspired an entire shelf of classic films, including Strangers on a Train , The Talented Mr. Ripley , The American Friend , Purple Noon , Carol , and others.
“Deep Water” is based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, a writer (“The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Strangers on a Train,””The Two Faces of January”) right up Lynne’s dark and sordid alley.
But no one is getting nominated for this one, which is the first english language screen adaptation of mystery writer Patricia Highsmith’s 1957 novel, a much lesser work than other classics of hers that made it to the movies including The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train.
Novels by the brilliant Patricia Highsmith have led to some equally brilliant films—Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” and Anthony Minghella’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (along with René Clément’s earlier French version of that book, “Purple Noon”)—are notable examples.
The remarkably shallow and eventually pointless film lacks a boiled bunny and is based on a 1957 novel of the same name by high priestess of perverse murderers Patricia Highsmith (“Strangers on a Train,” the Tom Ripley novels).
Though based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, and directed by the man who gave us Fatal Attraction and 9 ½ Weeks , Deep Water plays like a sexy, macabre Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , an intense dialogue between an unhappily married couple that’s occasionally disrupted by outsiders.
It’s hardly Eyes Wide Shut or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but the central dynamic makes sense.
Some have even compared it to the infamous 2012 horror "The Devil Inside," which ended with an abrupt fade to black, and text onscreen telling audiences to visit a website to see the film's ending.
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There’s more to the story: a startling rumor, a couple of parties, a nosy neighbor (a typically sharp Tracy Letts), a few unfortunate “accidents” and a swimming pool that glows as ominously as the one in “La Piscine,” Jacques Deray’s 1969 classic of sex, deceit and murder.
Is he as crestfallen as the cuckold played by William H. Macy, in “Boogie Nights” (1997)?
The way Ana de Armas says it, it’s a completely valid excuse to subject Ben Affleck to the most unapologetic cuckery an actor has had to endure on screen since William H. Macy in “Boogie Nights.”