Movie Review: Deep Water | The week Great Britain

Twenty years since Adrian Lyne (Fateful attraction, 9½ weeks) last made a film, he’s back with this adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1957 novel Deep Water, Tim Robey said in The Daily Telegraph. The setting has shifted from 1950s New England to modern-day New Orleans, where an unhappily married couple, Vic (Ben Affleck) and Melinda (Ana de Armas), live in a “cheerful cocoon of wealth.” He’s a tech millionaire who got rich developing chips for military drones, while she’s a “shameless vixen” many years his junior whose “serial infidelity” – committed under his nose – may have him jerks or not away from their lovers. De Armas is “magnetic” but her character “stubbornly refuses” to develop; Ultimately, there’s something dated about her “femme fatale-esque” unknowability and “sizzling sexuality.” The film has a “splendid viewability” abound, and the fact that the co-stars dated in real life adds “Frisson” — but the finale is a “mess” that keeps the “playful promise” of the opening overshadowed.

Highsmith’s books usually make “great movies,” Brian Viner said in the Daily Mail; think of The talented Mr Ripley or Carol. The problem here isn’t so much with the actors — they’re “fine” — but with the people they play, who are so unlikable that you stop caring about “who did what to whom.” Casting Affleck wasn’t the “worst idea,” Danny Leigh said in an interview financial times, but in this role he uses so many “sluggish scowls” that he starts conjuring up Mr. Potato Head. The film feels “perpetually at odds with itself,” at once snarky and sullen, “edgy post-#MeToo,” and “ethically grubby.” Still, it’s a “hot cocktail” for those who missed the once-ubiquitous erotic thriller genre.