Very early on in director Adrian Lyne’s Deep Water, Ana de Armas’ Melinda, the flirtatious young wife of Ben Affleck’s Vic, a retired defense contractor who spends his copious free time mountain biking, publishing a vanity magazine and raising snails, slips into a slinky backless dress before heading off to a cocktail party.
“Look at me,” she says, as Vic cradles her ankle and slides her delicate foot into a high heel shoe, “not at the mess.”
Oh, my dear Melinda, what would be the fun in that?
The first movie in two decades from Lyne, Hollywood’s erstwhile prince of seductively lit, sexually charged hits from the VHS-era (think 1983’s Flashdance and 1987’s Fatal Attraction), Deep Water is a howler of the first order. It is the kind of unintentionally hilarious and profoundly puerile so-bad-it’s-fun knee-slapper that demands to be watched at a late show in a decrepit downtown movie theater with your best friend from college.
Of course, this being the nascent days following our forced two-year retreat from a deadly virus and not say, 2002, when Lyne’s last film Unfaithful was released, you’ll have to settle for a spot on the couch as you pull it up on Hulu and catch a few scenes between college basketball games.
After procuring the troubled and much delayed production in its acquisition of Fox Studios, the Disney Corporation has dumped it off on its streaming cousin with all the ceremony of an ex leaving a box of your old paperbacks on the stoop a couple years after the breakup. (The film is based on a 1957 potboiler by The Talented Mr. Ripley scribe Patricia Highsmith.)
That it stars Affleck and de Armas, paramours from what seems like countless celebrity news cycles ago, gives the film both a guilty thrill of peeping through a forgotten keyhole as well as the musty emanation of a moldering Us Weekly. Judging from the noticeable lack of spark they share on screen, you’ll also be hit with a deep sense of relief that they have both moved forward with their lives.
But the absurd machinations of the script in which the pair are trapped is much more of an issue than the pair themselves.
Written by Zach Helm (2006’s excellent Stranger Than Fiction) and Sam Levinson (writer-director behind last year’s regrettable Malcolm & Marie), Affleck is tasked with peering on like a forlorn meerkat as de Armas engages in seemingly promiscuous behaviors with various New Orleans himbos.
When these unfortunate souls (among them, Finn Wittrock of American Horror Story) are invited over for fancy dinners that sometimes include Lobster Bisque (she prefers mac and cheese), Vic has a tendency to share his plans to murder the clueless suitors, imparting the news in the same flat manner with which he informs them he has called an Uber.
The movie intends to draw a lot of tension out of whether these are idle threats meant as part of some sort of psychosexual game of intrigue between a couple looking to add a spark to their marriage or the diabolical promises of an actual sociopath. Unfortunately, Deep Water is about as psychologically rich as the magazine Vic produces as his side gig— it mainly features silhouetted pictures of Melinda carrying around her shoes— is artistically ambitious.
But what the film does have are many moments of jaw-dropping hilarity, though none of them are in the least bit intentional. (Despite the presence of Get Out’s Lil Rel Howery as one of Vic and Melinda’s blandly defined coterie of acquaintances, the number of purposeful moments of humor are virtually nil.) These range from Vic’s obsession over his pet snails (“They’re not for eating,” he bellows when one Melinda’s male friends suggest they fry some up with butter and garlic) to a histrionic denouement that recalls the classic SNL sketch Toonces the Driving Cat.
As absurd as this comes off, Lyne still knows how to construct scenes that build on each other in dynamic ways, and the movie rarely drags, especially impressive for a film this thematically incoherent. The result is meticulous constructed camp in the manner of Verhoeven’s Showgirls— yes, Deep Water is nearly that deliciously tawdry, and almost as eye-rollingly fun.
The fact that it takes itself so painfully seriously only adds to the film’s joyful ludicrousness. There are some messes so absolute— and some Hollywood movie so scrumptious in their misguidedness— that you cannot, and should not, look away.