Featured Image Credit: Hulu
Topics: Film and TV
Jake Massey
A new erotic thriller starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas is dividing critics.
Deep Water – based on the 1957 novel of the same name – began filming back in 2019, but because of you know what it was pushed back several times.
Watch the trailer here:
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Now, at last, the film is due to be released on Hulu tomorrow, March 18, and judging by the early reviews, it's very hard to tell whether or not it will be worth a watch.
Affleck and de Armas play a married couple in the thriller, which tells the story of their complicated relationship and the dangerous games they play.
A synopsis reads: 'Based on the celebrated novel by famed mystery writer Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley), Deep Water takes us inside the marriage of picture-perfect Vic (Affleck) and Melinda (de Armas) Van Allen to discover the dangerous mind games they play and what happens to the people that get caught up in them.'
Intriguing, right?
Well, at one end critics have heaped praise on 49-year-old Affleck and 33-year-old de Armas, crediting the film with resurrecting a genre; at the other, The Guardian gave it only two stars, and even criticised the performances of the stars.
Peter Bradshaw wrote: 'Deep Water looks like a huge amount of material has been shaped in the edit but there are odd gaps and elisions.
'De Armas behaves as if she’s in some saucy cologne commercial, and Affleck appears to have necked a hundredweight of Percocet before the cameras rolled.'
That's quite a contrast then to the interpretation of Polygon, which described Affleck's portrayal of Vic as 'amazing'.
The review reads: 'Affleck's performance is brilliantly modulated. Most of the time, he inhabits Vic with a terrible inertness, only emphasized by his physical size. As he looms darkly in the frame, even his stubble looking depressed, it can seem as if the performance is a conscious self-parody of the Sad Affleck meme.
'But there are also moments where he shows a scary inch of steel. A previous boyfriend of Melinda's disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and early in the film, Vic scares off her latest beau by claiming to have killed him.
'Affleck's suppressed, hyper-controlled rage makes it all too believable. He keeps Vic deliberately unreadable.'
So it's hard to know who to believe really.
You're probably best off seeing for yourself and making your own mind up.
Deep Water is available to watch on Prime Video or Hulu from March 18.
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