The Shallow Delights of Ben Affleck and Ana De Armas’ Deep Water

Passed down from generation to generation is a piece of wisdom that acts as both advice and warning: don’t fool your dick. While this saying is firmly entrenched in bro culture, it also applies to receptive partners. Aside from the complications of skillful language, failing to engage in sexual relations with people whose worldview you find incompatible with your own has likely prevented countless personal disasters.

But when no one has sex with “crazy,” a forbidden unknown arises, an unanswerable question of what lies beyond the horizon of common sense. What happens if you do it anyway? Furthermore, what if you really enjoy it? Or what if you’re the ‘crazy’ in question?

Enter: Deep water†

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Directed by Adrian Lyne and starring Ana de Armas and Ben Affleck, Deep water is an erotic thriller whose sole existence is to seemingly answer all these questions through the power of a spirited, melodramatic cinematic adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel. The two real-life exes play a married couple who are equally horny and hateful, who spend a lot of time torturing each other and their neighbors in New Orleans. Sparring around their precocious child, they insult each other with lascivious sighs and purrs that sound like threats.

There is also a minor murder. I think there’s water involved too, although it’s mostly in the form of drinking and only occasionally deep.

For the most part though Deep water has abandoned thought and logic for horny, unhinged vibes. It’s so pretty fun.

Deep water will make you believe that there is someone for everyone. Hope your soul mate enjoys it Deep water.

The film drops its audience in the middle of a strange domestic arrangement. Vic (Affleck) is a man who invented a microchip integral to drone warfare; he got rich from drone kills. He is married to Melinda (the Armas), a terminally amorous woman who apparently hates Vic. It’s not because she’s an ethical pacifist or concerned about the US government’s history of “accidental” civilian casualties, but because Vic is nice and boring.

How could a man who taught aerial robots kill be more boring, Melinda constantly wonders. How can a woman so horny be so mean, Vic wonders. Divorce is an option neither of them makes much sense.

There’s no explanation for how these two found each other (College? A hotel bar? Hinge?) although the relationship is clearly off, creating a movie experience that eerily resembles sitting at a table next to a date who has moved aside. You act like you don’t notice. You make eye contact with your own date. You both eavesdrop, but you only get answers to questions that you have yet to figure out on your own.

Vic and Mel have worked out a shaky arrangement in which Melinda is allowed to have side affairs with younger, apparently more arousing young men. (Melinda has a side deal with a faceless god that allows a steady stream of very handsome twunks into her life.) I don’t really know what Vic has in it, but the air slayer seems to enjoy Melinda’s existence in his house. This setup eventually turns sour when Melinda escalates her affairs, hoping to get some reaction from Vic, and Vic gets angrier at how embarrassing those cases are.

The performance of De Armas is dripping with hissing and shrinking. She breaks each word down to the syllable and then twists them in a way that seems both incredibly exciting and terrifying. She whispers alarm in phrases like “lobster bisque” and “mac and cheese” in a way that will now haunt me whenever I look at a New American menu.

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Opposite the Armas, Affleck plays Nick Dunne again, the dense, airless husband he played in 2014 Gone girl. In that spectacular film, Nick, like Vic, also had a sociopathic wife who hated him. But her resentment was fueled by Nick’s lack of ambition; he peaked too early in life. There’s a lot more threat and a lot less opacity with Vic, who presents himself as a more loser than Nick ever did. While Vic and Nick’s eyebrows and sighs are from the same Affleck, Vic’s stems from frustrated annoyance, while Nick’s are more idiocy. Affleck is a guru of calibrating and finding the difference between.

Affleck and the Armas’s performances, enhanced with kills (plural!), twunks, snails (Vic has a snail garden), jazz, and unhinged bouts of hateful fellatio have made for one of my favorite movies of late. I can’t think of a crazier, sexier time on film. Deep water is the movie you’ll want to text your friends about and then invite them over again to watch together so you can witness their reactions when, say, the Armas pantomimes pluck one of Affleck’s stray pubic hairs from her teeth.

Deep water Also acts as a fond reminder of the infamous Affleck/de Armas real relationship, eternally imprisoned in amber. Both have since moved on – she is Playing Marilyn Monroeand he revived the couple known as Bennifer — but the psychosexual thriller was supposedly so powerful it sparked a romance.

The two reportedly fell for each other when Deep Water was filmed in the fall of 2019. They became a visible couple in March 2020, just before the pandemic shut down social life in the US. Perhaps because of the lack of anyone doing anything and De Armas’s newfound stardom (Blades offt was released in the fall of 2019), photographers spent a lot of time tracking Affleck and the Armas’ activities together. They took walks, drank Dunkin’ coffee together, took more walks, drank more coffee. They officially became the “It” couple of the pandemic quarantine. Their eventual breakup cemented Affleck’s recognizable status when he began… drink more coffee and order things from Amazon† In the same period, the Armas famously blocked the Ana de Armas Updates stan Twitter account that fervently supported the starlet.

What a fun and honestly embarrassing moment in time for anyone terminally online! Which many of us were, in those early pandemic days.

It was a time when a lot of things were taken from us – and for a little while, it looked like we might not get this movie. It was delayed several times and then pulled from the release schedule. It went straight to Hulu, but it survived. We may never know how close we were to losing Deep water forever! And luckily we never will.

Deep water is currently streaming on Hulu.