Do you like psychological thrillers, Ana de Armas, and snails? If so, you’ll love Deep Water (2022), the story of loveless couple Vic (Ben Affleck) and Melinda (de Armas) Van Allen.
The Van Allens live in an opulent Louisiana town, one that apparently is constantly hosting parties in a kind of never-ending Great Gatsby cycle of good times. Vic designed the guidance chip in drones, and now lives in comfortable retirement with his insane wife and his precocious daughter, the latter of which sports the unfortunate name “Trixie.”
Melinda constantly and flagrantly carries on flirtations and affairs with younger men, often quite openly during the various high-life soirees the couple attends. Vic begrudgingly allows his wife to carry on in this manner, even as his friends express concern. His philosophy is to let his wife make her own decisions, a philosophy he also extends to his daughter (who opted to attend a—gasp!—public school, rather than a tony private one).
Of course, there’s only so much humiliation one man can take, and despite his Hosea-esque patience with his wife’s adulterous shenanigans, Vic finally—in his own, quiet way—snaps.
A great deal of the appeal of this movie—besides the aforementioned Ana de Armas playing a riotous sexpot—is trying to figure out the nature of the Van Allens’s deeply messed up relationship. Rather than respecting her husband for his loose grip on her, Melinda resents him, questioning his manhood and deriding his lack of passion. When he dances with the attractive wife of new neighbor, the suspicious mystery writer Don Wilson, Melinda’s attraction for her husband is restored, albeit briefly.
When he kills for her, it drives her crazy—first with angry grief, then with desire. When Vic asks Melinda why she is not afraid of him, she responds, “Because I’m the thing you killed for.” Yikes!
Again, this couple is messed up. Caught in the crossfire is their daughter, who strangely enough never seems too taken aback by her parents’ marital warfare. After Vic drowns one of her wife’s lovers in the pool during a rainstorm—there are no witnesses, but it’s clear he committed the crime to the viewer, and to Melinda and Don—his daughter intuitively knows. She then matter-of-factly asks her father how he did it, though he continues to deny to her that he did.
Talk about a weird family. On top of it all, Vic’s hobby is collecting and raising snails. I struggled initially to understand the significance of the snails to the story, until I read this Entertainment Weekly interview with the on-set snail wrangler (what a great job title).
Basically, there are two reasons for the snails:
- They represent a kind of animal that is without guile or deceit, and simply exist with one another (and reproduce like mad, apparently, unlike the strained Vic and Melinda); as Max Anton, the snail handler put it, “the snails were arguably the least slimy characters in the story.”
- The author of the 1957 novel on which the film is based, Patricia Highsmith, apparently loved snails, and would carry around a handbag full of lettuce and about 100 snails, so it seems she just shoehorned them into this story of marital misconduct.
The film overall is a bit hit-or-miss, but it achieved what a thriller is supposed to achieve: a sense of uncertainty and suspense. Another of Melinda’s former lovers, Martin McRae, has gone missing, and Vic subtly threatens her latest boy toy by claiming to be the killer. That guy survives (escaping to a new job in New Mexico), and McRae’s real killer is caught. Still, the claim casts doubt upon Vic, especially on the part of Don Wilson, who despises Vic almost from the outset.
For my more prudish readers, a note of warming: it’s a pretty, uh, sexual film. Some reviewers classify it as an “erotic thriller,” so be warned. For some of you, however, that might be further inducement to see it.
Regardless, it’s a pretty good example of the psychological thriller, though better ones do exist. If you’ve got a couple of hours on a dark night, though, you could do worse than 2022’s Deep Water.