Deep Water
A good old sex thriller, this is a dying genre. Not a problem, when you got Arnon Milchan bankrolling and Adrian Lyne directing, he did so much of those before.
This was apparently based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, the Ripley lady. I can see some Ripley in extremely buff dollar store Batman. The casting is spot on.
Millionaire extremely buff dude is married with trophy wife Ana de Armas. They don’t do anything other to have fun, he invented some drone chip, therefore retired in his 30’s. Dinner parties and hang out with his toddler daughter.
The dude has a hobby, growing snails. Since she doesn’t have any other outlet for her energy, her hobby is getting drunk and brazenly cheating on the hubby. It’s completely out in the open, their friends even warn him. He seems pretty chill, maybe socially awkward, since he goes around joking he murdered the previous guy who was cucking him.
It’s one of those right wing “jokes”, but it backfires when the guy actually shows up dead. This makes it not funny anymore. But what really triggers her is another dinner party where her friend with potential benefits drowns in the pool. She outright accuses our dude of murder to the cops, doesn’t even blink.
Since they are white and rich, the coroner removing a dead body from their home filled with drugs, with suspected foul play is nothing more than a speedbump, it’s only a minor scandal, but their lives do not change that much.
She continues to cheat on him, goading him with foreplay, for no sex. He is so chill, all her lovers eventually have dinner in the house, with the couple. She nearly fucks the guests with her eyes, while the dude smoulders with internal rage.
One of their friends is the intellectual type, the kind that only hears NPR and reads The Atlantic back to back. He is a writer and suspects our protagonist from the start, confronting him over producing killer machines. Our protagonist deflects blame, and as a twofer, flirts with his wife, a move that baffles his friends.
Our protagonist raises his voice slightly when his wife starts fucking her boyfriends in their house. But he’s still very cool, calm, and collected. She cites the lack of emotion in feeling neglected, maybe saying all this is way to call attention to herself. Our protagonist is unfazed.
She invites some friend over and they have a mini-row over dinner, this has crossed a line. Our protagonist lures him into a secluded place after a couple days, and drowns him. Freaking psycho killer, the others deaths must be his doing too! They even go to a picnic on the same secluded location, but nothing is out of place.
Our protagonist goes back the next day, hides the body just a little better, but runs into the writer “friend”. This is such a coincidence, the wife must have set up this, somehow. Our protagonist is on a bike, but the writer is on a car, so he goes on ahead, speeding for some reason and dumps his car into a ravine. The wife is at home and discovers if her hubby did, by finding the documents.
Ultimately, the writer crashes his car and dies with a good auto-correct joke, the hubby gets away scot-free, but the wife knows he is a killer. Roll credits.
I think “extremely buff” in an understatement, that scene in the pool looks like Hulk with a pink hue. Ben Affleck can sell the menacing psycho just by staring at the camera, between this and Gone Girl.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.