Deep Water – Film Review

Deep Water takes us inside the marriage of picture-perfect Vic (Ben Affleck) and Melinda (Ana de Armas) Van Allen to discover the dangerous mind games they play and what happens to the people that get caught up in them.

Deep Water serves as the first film by director Adrian Lyne in twenty years, after taking an absence upon the release of Unfaithful. It also serves as Disney’s first erotic thriller in twenty-eight years since Color of Night. It’s actually kind of fascinating that this movie even exists in the first place, all things considered.

And because Lyne waited twenty years to make another movie, you’d probably expect it to be quite incredible, right? Well, sadly, that’s not the case. Deep Water is far from being an awful movie, but it’s also not really a good one, either. Nothing about this movie screams intense or even sexy, but it’s also undeniably entertaining and amusing to watch at times.

A lot of this stems from the chemistry between its two leads – Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas. These two allegedly dated in real life for a while which would certainly explain why they’re so natural with each other in virtually every single scene. There are plenty of moments where we simply watch their characters talking to each other about their marriage that was utterly fascinating.

But the film spends far too much time focusing on several subplots to the point where it gets annoying. This is basically the textbook definition of style over substance, to be honest. There’s a lot of scenes in this movie where I get the feeling that Lyne thought he was making something groundbreaking when in all actuality, he just ended up making something quite mediocre.

The writing can be a bit hit or miss for the most part. As I said, some of the dialogue here is brilliant and it can truly keep you on your toes. However, when the writing is boring, you can seriously feel it. It’s a two-hour movie that could’ve easily been condensed into an hour and a half because of the sheer amount of filler here.

Truth be told, I’m not exactly sure why Affleck and de Armas wanted to star in this movie together because it’s extremely average and formulaic, and you’d think they’d feel the same way because of just how much experience they have in the industry. Let’s just hope that they get some more great roles down the line because they’ve already proven time and time again just how fantastic they are in front of the camera. Time will only tell what they decide to choose for their next project.q