Deep Water
Film | Cert: 15 ★★★✩✩

Ana de Armas (Knives Out, No Time To Die) and Ben Affleck star in this flawed, but undeniably watchable erotic thriller from veteran Hollywood director Adrian Lyne (Flashdance, 9½ Weeks, Indecent Proposal).

Based on a 1957 novel by Patricia Highsmith, Deep Water has been adapted by screenwriters Zach Helm (Stranger Than Fiction) and Sam Levinson (Euphoria).

It marks Lyne’s return to filmmaking after an absence of two decades.
All that is holding together Vic (Affleck) and Melinda (de Armas) Van Allens’ ailing family unit, including daughter Trixie, is an arrangement which allows Melinda to have affairs — so long as she doesn’t request a divorce.

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Jacob Elordi and Ana de Armas in a scene from Deep Water

Meanwhile, despite reassuring everyone around him that he doesn’t have a jealous bone in his body, Vic has grown tired of Melinda’s extramarital dalliances and demands that she stops humiliating him. When his wife’s latest lover goes missing, Vic is accused by his neighbour (Tracy Letts, sublime as ever) of having murdered the young man.

Soon after that, Melinda’s next lover drowns at a party Vic is attending and fingers once again start to point towards her husband. But did he really do it, or is he being framed?

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Ben Affleck

There is something endearingly old-fashioned about Lyne’s film. Although we are once again back in the erotic thriller territory that made his career, Deep Water feels almost like an anomaly in a world where couple dynamics have moved on from kept woman/rich man tropes.

Still, Helm and Levison deliver a thoroughly engaging thriller mystery, only just let down by a slightly misjudged tone. Lyne may not have recaptured his glory days here, but he has given us a robustly acted mystery thriller we can all sink our teeth into.