Deep Water (2022)

Adrian Lyne returns after a twenty-year absence with Deep Water, an erotic psychological thriller that understands its assignment and refuses to apologize for it. Ben Affleck plays Vic Van Allen, a retired drone-technology millionaire who fills his days tending snails and tolerating the parade of lovers his wife Melinda (Ana de Armas) brings through their Louisiana home. The arrangement curdles into suspicion, then into bodies. Lyne shoots it all with the sweaty patience of a man who has made this kind of picture before and sees no reason to improve upon the formula. The result aims to unsettle. It does not aim to instruct.

The cast is white, and the handful of minority performers in supporting roles drift through without the screenplay ever noticing them. Race is not a subject here. Neither is class, though Vic's fortune hovers over every scene; his money is furniture, not argument. Melinda pursues her affairs with an openness that could read as liberation, except the film treats her appetite as a symptom of a poisoned marriage. This is not a story about a woman claiming her freedom. It is a story about two people using each other as weapons.

Viewers hunting for a lesson will leave empty-handed. There is no queer subtext, no environmental conscience, no celebration of bodies, no diagnosis dressed up as character. Vic's snails are a hobby, not a condition. The screenplay, adapted from Patricia Highsmith, keeps its pulp instincts intact and its sermonizing firmly offscreen. We get instead a marital war filmed with grim competence, a reminder that not every thriller wants to save the world. Some just want to watch it drown.

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