Deep Water is about how love sometimes leads us to do follies we never thought ourselves capable of, as the protagonists of this 2022 movie discover about each other.
This story does not begin with seduction and romantic love but with a couple who have already been married for a long time and have a baby girl.
Apparently, they should be the pure example of happiness, as they both seem like the dream man and woman for anyone.
He is an intelligent and still young man who has retired to enjoy life after making a lot of money selling military technology.
She is equally young and beautiful and has a free spirit that makes her even more sexy and irresistible.
Unfortunately, this spirit pushes her to become impatient with the American mentality, openly provoking him in front of their friends and flirting with other men.
When this happens again at a party with a young boy, her husband confronts him alone, threatening him and claiming that he has already killed a previous lover of his wife.
The rumor spreads quickly in the small community, and some people think it might be true in town since the boy in question has been missing for a long time.
Then, during another evening with friends, another boy seduced by her ends up drowning extremely suspiciously in the pool.
At that point, even the wife begins to suspect that her husband may be a murderer, but that does not stop her from continuing to date other men.
In addition, a local journalist/writer begins to investigate the affair, even hiring a detective to tail the couple.
When this madness reaches a climax, we may discover that love can be even crazier than it initially seemed.
A couple torn and joined between love and hate
Ana de Armas has been much talked about recently for her part in Blonde, where she convincingly plays the divine Marilyn Monroe.
However, this role is more ambiguous and exciting without taking anything away from the immortal Hollywood star’s life biopic.
This character is in no way trying to please the audience; I mean morally since aesthetically, the perfection of her body with a petite but very sensual beauty is unquestionable.
Morally, I said, it is a different story. Her infidelity to the husband is a constant annoyance that irritates the viewer almost more than the murders, as is her fundamental indifference to her young daughter.
On the other side of this perverse household table, we have Ben Affleck, who has never convinced me too much with his performances but whom I greatly respect as a director with a hard-edged talent for crime stories like The Town or Live by Night.
In this strange role in this bizarre 2022 movie, the actor is really the driving force that gives meaning to the title Deep Water.
Wanting to explain the plot scientifically, the wife is the triggering cause and the husband, on the other hand, is the terrible effect; the two of them, however, seem to avoid any consequences of their actions.
Thus, we don’t have to look for explanations beyond what we see and what these characters say, just as it is difficult to judge their morality of living each situation to the extreme.
Attracting and repelling each other, each cannot do without the other, as the sexy provocateur openly states: Without me, you would die of boredom.
The dynamic of this strange relationship is an ever-changing ecosystem, where yesterday’s rules disappear in front of today’s actions, and who knows what tomorrow will hold next.
The most beautiful women of a strange director
Adrian Lyne has always been a director toward whom I have felt a similar love and hate as the protagonists in this story.
However, even those who dislike his movies must admit his great film technique, especially in his use of light and cinematography that makes his stories very intimate and personal.
However, he often seemed to me to be a talent that failed to hit the mark, especially with movies like Indecent Proposal or Unfaithful that could have penetrated deeper into human cruelty and madness but were limited only to a lukewarm happy ending.
I will avoid mentioning the drab remake of Lolita, which had good character complicity but lost the magnificent black irony of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1960s masterpiece of the same name.
Once again, however, no one can deny how Adrian Lyne has an almost unique talent for making all the actresses he works with beautiful and radiant with sensuality.
The most glaring example is Glenn Close. Despite being an extraordinary actress (among the best of her generation and beyond) after Fatal Attraction, she was never as sexy in any other movie.
Although this director’s best-loved hits with audiences are the famous Flashdance and 9½ Weeks, I have always considered Jacob’s Ladder his best work, a strange psychedelic horror film with an outstanding Tim Robbins in the lead.
What I most appreciated in Deep Water of 2022 was a partial return to that sick atmosphere of cruelty and madness, albeit more subdued and less violent than the 1990 movie.
The murders are few, but they are brutal and fast in a believable way, and the story thankfully does not get tangled up with unnecessary filler.
Indeed we are talking about a flawed movie, but it remains an experience to encounter the thrill of this unusual couple’s life.
