Deep Water

A V.F. writer tries to make sense of Hulu's Deep Water, starring former couple Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas.

How were they to know that many of us would be tuning into Deep Water to catch a glimpse of the steamy chemistry between our favorite pandemic couple that no longer is (RIP BenAna), and maybe weren't as interested in seeing Ben Affleck bike through a forest while de Armas sort of sadly packs a suitcase? The scene is very similar, but not exactly the same, as the one which opens the film, in which Vic bikes home and takes off his pants on the porch before entering the house (remember, it's an erotic thriller). At the end of the movie, Vic keeps his pants on while Melinda says, “I saw Tony,” then proceeds to burn Tony's wallet and identification. While Lyne's film is quite similar to Highsmith's novel—down to keeping the somewhat antiquated names “Vic” and "Melinda" for its central couple—Deep Water quite literally veers into a completely different direction in its third act. While this is happening, Melinda realizes that Vic has murdered Tony and is packing a bag, presumably planning to leave him. Melinda engages in extra-marital affairs from time to time; Vic murders some of her lovers, undetected by the police but drawing suspicion from both Melinda and their neighbor, Don. Towards the end of the novel, Vic murders Melinda's latest lover, Tony, by throwing him off a cliff and hiding the body in a shallow river, weighing it down with rocks. A lot of fuss has been made over Adrian Lyne’s film adaptation of Deep Water, based on the novel by The Talented Mr. Ripley scribe Patricia Highsmith. (After a score of Covid-related delays, the movie finally debuted on Hulu today.) For one, Deep Water stars early-pandemic “it” couple Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, who met during filming, fell in love, and briefly took over the internet with their matching jewelry and penchant for cardboard cut outs.

Deep Water, a not so steamy erotic thriller starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, and based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, is out now.

He proudly calls her brilliant, they let her decide where she wants to go to school even though she is only six, we see her experimenting with a potato battery by herself, and at one point Vic even lets his daughter have a glass of wine (even though Vic himself isn’t really a drinker, that’s Melinda’s thing). Trixie chats to him about the murder in the swimming pool, and although he initially denies it, she says she thinks he did it and doesn’t seem all that bothered. Stay to the very end of the credits and you get an additional gag: “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” plays. Early on Trixie is annoying her mother by getting Alexa to play “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” over and over (which doesn’t seem to bother Vic). Vic interacts with his daughter with warmth, although he talks to her as if she was an adult. So at the end of the film, just after the beat where we understand that murderous Vic and adulterous Melinda are forever stuck together, torturing each other and causing damage to those who are in their orbit, the credits play out to Trixie (Grace Jenkins) singing “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” in the back of their car. Lucky for Vic that a shaken up Don is driving like a crazy person trying to get away from Vic (who is on a bike…) and crashes off the edge of a ravine swerving to avoid Vic. In the end, knowing he’s going to be taken to the police by Don, Vic goes home and strangles Melinda, before Don and a police officer arrive at the house. The film has an ending which is more reminiscent of Gone Girl, which also stars Affleck as a man suspected of murdering his wife. In the book, Melinda orchestrates a way for Don to discover evidence of Tony’s murder while Vic is checking Tony’s body (a bit like in the film), though Don doesn’t crash his car, he survives. But Melinda decides to burn the evidence she’s found and tells Vic she has seen Tony, which they both know is not true. We understand Malcolm is one of his wife’s former lovers, and Vic tells Joel, his wife’s latest squeeze, that he killed Malcolm with a hammer. There’s no way Tony’s death could be mistaken for an accident and Vic is even caught by Don when he’s trying to poke Tony’s body down into the water with a stick. It’s Vic himself who starts the rumor that he’s the killer and seems to rather enjoy the notoriety it brings him.

Look, pitch me Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas in an erotic murder thriller and you've got my attention at baseline. But trust me, Deep Water is not worth ...

The film culminates in one of the more absurd sequences I’ve seen in the last year across all of film, where Affleck chases a man through the woods on a bike when the guy is in a car, having just witnessed him dispose of a body. The whole idea that Affleck isn’t jealous of his wife’s escapades clearly is not the case once he starts going on a murder spree. So grim, in fact, that eventually Affleck starts killing off her younger lovers in very obvious ways to the point where even his own daughter is questioning him about being a murderer, a fact that neither of them seem terribly concerned about.

The snails that Ben Affleck's Vic breeds in the Hulu film 'Deep Water' aren't for eating, but they are a hallmark of author Patricia Highsmith's ...

Knoppert is drawn to how the snails “come together in a kiss of voluptuous intensity,” and Highsmith sketches Knoppert as a haughty man proud of his knowledge of the “sensuality” of the snails’ mating process. This portrait of Vic as a man driven primarily by loyalty and desire is supported by the film’s changed ending, which alters what Highsmith put on the page. And when both versions of Vic muse about how far snails will travel to find their partners (“Crossing garden walls,” he says in the book; “A snail will climb a 12-foot wall to find its mate,” Vic tells Don in the movie), what Vic is really alluding to are the things he’s willing to do to track down his wife. In Highsmith’s novel, Vic — like the author and like Knoppert — is fascinated by watching the snails mate, so much so that it has become his only hobby. In the film’s first garage scene, Lyne communicates without dialogue Vic’s observation from the book that “the snails still loved his hands, crawling slowly but unhesitatingly onto the forefinger that he extended to them.” In spending time with and even sleeping in the same room as the snails, Vic finds intimacy and tranquility that remind him of what he and Melinda once had. He has named the snails Edgar and Hortense; he believes they’re “genuinely in love”; and he’s frustrated by Melinda’s growing disinterest in them as her infidelity becomes more brazen (“You used to think snails were interesting and that a lot of other things were interesting, until your brain began to atrophy,” he says). The film adaptation of Deep Water doesn’t lift all these details, but the ones Helm and Levinson do choose are effectively used to honor Highsmith’s original intent for the character. The piece’s last line gives Clavering an end that is similar to Knoppert’s: “He was waist-deep when he stumbled, waist-deep but head under when the snail crashed down upon him, and he realized as the thousands of pairs of teeth began to gnaw at his back, that his fate was both to drown and to be chewed to death.” And in Beautiful Shadow, Wilson also describes a third story about snails that Highsmith considered writing, about “an apocalyptic, postnuclear world” in which humans returning to repopulate Earth have to battle mutated, carnivorous snails. They’re all over every visible surface, weighing down the room’s wallpaper and even forming a sort of chandelier hanging from the ceiling, and they trap him inside, overwhelm him by sliding all over his body and into his mouth, and consume him. During the film’s first scene in that garage, Lyne and cinematographer Eigil Bryld go from close-ups of the snails’ whirled exoskeletons and protruding tentacles to a close-up of Affleck’s eyes, gazing with what can only be described as affection at the snails sliding along his hand. None of Highsmith’s other major adapted works feature snails: not Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Two Faces of January, or Carol. But Highsmith’s interest in snails goes back to her time at Barnard College, where she studied zoology for a year and “felt a strong tenderness for animals, particularly cats and snails, both of which she kept as pets,” writes Andrew Wilson in his biography Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. The self-described “strange pastime” included observing and writing about the unique mating rituals of land snails, which are nearly all hermaphroditic. In Deep Water, the Patricia Highsmith adaptation from iconic erotic-thriller director Adrian Lyne and screenwriters Zach Helm and Sam Levinson, Ben Affleck’s Vic is a weird guy.

Seeing exes Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas on screen together will be an undeniable attraction (if not of the "Fatal" variety) for "Deep Water," but that ...

Adapted from the novel by Patricia Highsmith ("The Talented Mr. Ripley") and relegated to a low-key premiere on Hulu, the story hinges on the strange marriage between Vic (Affleck) and Melinda ("Knives Out's" de Armas), a picture-perfect couple that outwardly have everything, including his invention-earned wealth and their adorable young daughter.The two have reached an apparent understanding, however, that allows her to compensate for his indifference and emotional distance by taking lovers, an unhappily-ever-after dynamic that causes discomfort among their friends, with whom they regularly throw neighborhood parties, mostly due to her brazenness.As for Vic, he acts unperturbed by his wife's infidelity, but there's the little matter of Melinda's one-time "friend" who has gone missing, and lingering suspicions as to whether he had anything to do with that.Vic doesn't seek to quell those rumblings, underscoring the mind games that the couple plays not only with each other, but those around them. While the movie falls apart toward the end, the mystery -- and crackling central performances -- cruises along at a low boil much of the way. Seeing exes Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas on screen together will be an undeniable attraction (if not of the "Fatal" variety) for "Deep Water," but that shouldn't obscure the simple pleasures of this erotic thriller directed by Adrian Lyne, a crafty veteran of that genre.

The world has missed Adrian Lyne, the British director of erotically charged cinema like Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal, and 9½ Weeks.

It is almost painful to watch her bounce off the nearly asexual Vic; no wonder their bedroom life cascades into a terrifying game of murder and misery. It has big stars (Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas). It is unapologetically sexy and sexual, with all the uncomfortable hangups such material brings to the fore. A subplot involving a nosy neighbor trying to solve the mystery of the missing boyfriends is almost entirely superfluous since we more or less know everything that’s happening. Deep Water’s biggest flaw is that, for an erotic thriller, emphasis on the thriller, it’s all kind of obvious. Fatal Attraction (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), and Indecent Proposal (1993) were all massive hits, each landing in the top ten of their respective years. The world has missed Adrian Lyne, the British director of erotically charged cinema like Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal, and 9½ Weeks. Absent from the big screen since 2002’s Unfaithful, Lyne is a throwback to an earlier, better age, one in which he and Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, Showgirls) were the kings of movies for adults that nudged up to the line of being adult movies.

The long-delayed "Deep Water" now has an awkward real-life twist, given that stars Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas dated and have since broken up, and Affleck ...

Although neither Affleck nor de Armas have given any indication they care about the reactions, it’s probably not the most pleasant experience to know that a major narrative of the movie is its potentially uncomfortable real-life implications, instead of the actual film. The Washington Post’s Michael O’Sullivan wrote that the film “is practically smoldering — with the sour-smelling smoke of a burning trash fire,” while the Associated Press went with “tedious and clunky.” The New York Times said “There’s surprisingly little sex, and what there is has none of the vividness and tactility Lyne is known for,” and the Hollywood Reporter (like quite a few others) invoked Affleck and de Armas’s relationship: “The primary usefulness of ‘Deep Water’ is as a record for celebrity chroniclers of the off-camera romance that made [Affleck and de Armas] a tabloid thing for a minute.” “There’s something wrong with me too,” Vic says, as the music grows louder and louder before the scene abruptly ends. A source told Page Six that de Armas just didn’t want to stay in Los Angeles full-time, where Affleck lives and shares custody of his three children with ex-wife Jennifer Garner. A few months later, Affleck was photographed spending time with Lopez, and social media lost its collective mind. This is not how things were supposed to go: “Deep Water” (co-written by “Euphoria” creator Sam Levinson and screenwriter Zach Helm) was announced to a decent amount of fanfare in August 2019, as it was the first film from director Adrian Lyne in nearly 20 years. The couple decided to quarantine together in Los Angeles and were constantly photographed doing the most mundane activities: Going on masked walks, taking their dogs out for a stroll, getting coffee.

The 81-year-old English director Adrian Lyne made his mark in Hollywood decades ago with movies like Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal and Unfaithful ...

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Deep Water (Ana de Armas and Ben Affleck) is based on a novel but what did the movie change from the book? Read our Deep Water ending explained to find out.

In the book, Melinda and Lionel (named Don in the book) concoct a plan to get Vic arrested, having been repeatedly let off by the police. Vic returns home and in sudden fit of rage, strangles Melinda to death and is then arrested for her murder. Lionel speeds off in his car, Vic following on his bike and by taking a shortcut he manages to intercept Lionel, who swerves out of the way and drives straight over the cliff edge to his death. He tries to sink it again only for Lionel to show up suddenly, thrilled at the prospect of having caught Vic in the act of concealing his crime. Vic follows Tony and offers to give him a ride to check out an area of land that Tony could develop, saying Melinda is there waiting for them. Stuffing his pockets with rocks, Vic sends Tony's body to the bottom of the river. Deep Water starts with married couple Melinda (de Armas) and Vic (Affleck) at the seeming peak of their attraction to each other. Their daughter Trixie can tell that her mother is sad, and when Vic says it's because her friend died, Trixie asks her father if he killed him. Their group of friends, perplexed by Vic's apparent 'confession', confront him and he says that of course, he didn't kill Malcolm. Soon after, Malcolm's body is found and someone is later arrested for his murder, clearing Vic from suspicion. The group bake cookies and hang out but realise Richard hasn't come inside, which is when Melinda spots his body floating in the water. Deep Water is based on the book of the same name by Patricia Highsmith, but there have been some changes to that original story, including a totally new ending. The erotic thriller stars Ana de Armas and Ben Affleck as married couple Melinda and Vic who are missing their spark.

Ana De Armas and Ben Affleck shine in "Deep Water," an erotic thriller directed by Adrian Lyne now streaming on Hulu.

If you can’t cut loose and let the inconsistencies go, however, “Deep Water” will be a certified belly flop. “Deep Water” is very much a hit-or-miss movie, with entire scenes in which characters act in a manner that defies expectation. “Deep Water,” the new movie streaming on Hulu starring onetime couple Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, is a throwback to a bygone era.

The erotic thriller starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas includes a very memorable final act.

Meanwhile, Vic has gone back to the gorge in an attempt to better hide the body but is soon intercepted by Don – who clearly realises that something fishy is going on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times podcast with Jane Garvey. Deep Water is released on Prime Video in the UK on Friday 18th March 2022. Anyway, Vic is able to shrug off any police interest relatively easily, and soon Melinda has turned her attention to another love interest – this time a former boyfriend named Tony. One day Vic picks up Tony in his truck and tells him he's taking him to a building site that might interest him, but it very soon becomes apparent that he has rather less benevolent intentions. Two people in particular publicly accuse Vic – Melinda and Don Wilson (Tracy Letts), a novelist who recently moved into the area and has not taken much of a shine to Vic. This fear becomes reality not long after when Melinda finds Tony's wallet in Vic's private lab – and it appears that he'd been found out.

Collider: I have to ask about the fact that it's been 20 years since you directed Unfaithful. · Was that movie you were going to do also a psychological thriller ...

I thought that was an element that it would have been a pity not to have. I thought it was a pity not to have a sense of complicity between her and him. I liked the thought that she did that because she didn’t want him to go to prison. I thought that it was a pity not to have a sense of complicity between these two people, so that when he’s looking through the window, at the beginning, at her making out with a boyfriend at a party, she knows that he’ll be watching. What made you decide to do that and how hard was that decision to make? You have a daughter of five, sitting in the bath and saying, “Daddy, when Charlie drowned in the swimming pool, did his feet touch the ground?” And he says, “I don’t know. What I tried to avoid, to be honest, was an “arrangement.” I wanted you to be dumped into a relationship that is in tatters, if you like. I wanted you to feel that this was a marriage where the relationship had gotten out of hat. I didn’t want to feel that he said, “Well, you can go out and screw whoever you want, and eventually you’ll come back, and you’ll be happier with me.” I just thought that was detestable. That’s why I thought that it needed more money and I needed a lot of time to do it. And also, on the other end, in the cutting, I enjoyed working digitally on that. The mind games they play with each other push their relationship to the edge of jealousy and lust, and comes with dangerous consequences that could be responsible for the downfall of it all.

From Gone Girl to The Last Duel and now Deep Water, Ben Affleck is just so very good at being so very bad.

Even as Affleck wasn’t the only one playing a flawed character in Gone Girl, he was the one that set everything in motion through his own depravity. Speaking of depraved, one of the most underrated performances of last year was when he played an egotistical tyrant in The Last Duel. It was already a film full of some really great, multi-layered performances though it was Affleck that stole every scene he was in. He is so good at getting you to feel repulsed by Vic as he commits heinous acts. It is a shame that his roles following that film weren’t as good as that was such a high mark. Affleck captures the obsessively creepy nature of his character perfectly, playing him as a sulking and petulant manchild who is creeping around in the corners of scenes while constantly observing the actions of the room. Just how horrible is Vic? Well, that is something that the film keeps under wraps initially.

Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas star in Hulu Original Deep Water and we're keen to explore the Deep South locations where this feature was filmed.

Deep Water has been in development since 2013 with Fox 2000 Pictures originally holding the rights to the source material. This program has helped the state to thrive amongst Hollywood projects. Deep Water was filmed around the United States with a majority of the production taking place in the Deep South state of Louisiana.