A Short Note on DEEP WATER and the Art of the Uncanny (Patreon)

So I’ve been working for months on two monster columns for next week (a French Dispatch deep dive and also the big year end list), but I took time out of today to immediately watch DEEP WATER on Hulu because it’s probably the film I’ve probably been most excited to see in the last few years… Why is that?

Because it’s Adrian Lyne’s first movie in 20 years.

If unfamiliar, he’s a director who made a career of making smart, “sexually charged” movies that were actually for adults. We’re talking Flashdance. 9 1/2 Weeks. Fatal Attraction. Indecent Proposal. Unfaithful. Not to mention a misguided attempt at Lolita and the dramatic horror outlier of Jacob’s Ladder (a movie whose imagery freaked the fuck out of me as a kid). And sadly he’s been gone for twenty years in a state of semi-retirement. But honestly, the genre on the whole has been gone for 20 years, too. I always see these columns or posts wondering where all the sex in movies has gone answer is sadly, “kids can see sex on the internet now, so there’s no market for it.” Meanwhile, once upon a time teens would flock to dumb sex comedies for the chance to see a boob. Likewise, adults would actually go see taut, sex-laden thrillers that played in the danger space of attraction. And outside of perhaps Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct, Lyne was the best at making those kinds of movies. And now, after two decades, he’s back! And it’s Ben Affleck / Ana de Armas erotic thriller, no less? WHATEVER IT IS, SIGN ME UP!!!

Turns out, the end result is absurd.

But I mean that in all the ways (note: this will all be spoiler-free). The script is, uh, all over the place in a way that helps confirm my ongoing opinions about Euphoria and its cyclical, repetitive storytelling. And the final DI of the film is often washed out, over-lit, and sterile, but that’s both the shitty modern requirement of streamers and the unfortunate part of what reads as “normal” in the era of digital photography (my kingdom for some smoky, textured grain). But it’s also this appeal to normalcy that reminded me of the exact quality that I like in Lyne’s films. Because he had this penchant for making thrillers that are light on the thrills. Instead, he would spend much of the running time playing with domestic normalcy. Family time. Dog walks. Trips to school. So much of the story of all his work is dedicated to these normal acts because he’s always looking for that crucial juxtaposition with the elements that come later.

Moreover, he’s trying to create these weird spaces where the uncanny comes out. The uncanny being “the psychological experience of something as not simply mysterious, but creepy, often in a strangely familiar way. It may describe incidents where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling, eerie, or taboo context.” David Lynch is the overt master of the uncanny, but Lyne aims for much subtle and mundane forms. For instance, at one point early on in Deep Water, I think I said to myself, “this is the least believable adult party I’ve ever seen.” Not just because of the weird mix of patrons and odd pandemonium. It’s also the way they feature moments where everyone stops to dance to some rockin’ jazz tune like it’s Peanuts and Linus started playing on the piano. And of course, there is the fascination with snails, whose metaphor is pretty clearly expressed in the film so I’m not sure why it’s such a curio online, except that it such a delightfully odd bit of character behavior that feels so specific, so vivid, and so overt as to inspire an audience’s continued squint.

But the uncanny sparks out more when the actual thrills come out. Often it’s stark, sudden violence. A gruesome image or sound. Like, with Fatal Attraction many remember the boiled bunny (which isn’t actually even really shown). Here, we get a couple moments much the same. But they aren’t “stylized” in the way we’re often used to with things like that. Instead, there’s a kind of mundane ugliness to them that makes for an arresting image.

But most of all, the uncanny comes out in performance. This genuinely might be one of my favorites from Affleck, which I’ve been saying a lot the last couple years. It’s not just his alternating settings of his behavior, from dad, to stoic, to jealous, to weakened horndog, it’s also the way he can press and hold tension within all sorts of those moods. You always know exactly what he’s thinking, but never what he’s going to say or do next. Which makes it one of his best weirdos. Meanwhile, Ana de Armas gets to rev her engines as a chaos demon and play with 90 different feelings, but she gets to milk her tension by saying the exact most hurtful thing as “a joke,” which is really just a subconscious control mechanism (I know someone who used to do this a lot and oof). It’s all of her id all of the time. And rounding out the cast (outside of the series of suitors) is the great Tracy Letts, who knows EXACTLY what movie he’s in and what his role is within it. Because in the end, there is no way to really be outside their myopia and so the real joke is on everyone else.

The truth is it’s hard to describe exactly why I like this movie without getting into specifics, except to say it’s mining the kinds of territories - whether genre, direction, or performance - that we don’t spend a lot of time in any more. And that’s a shame. Because I’m really curious what y’all think about it and how much of it really plays.

But mostly, I wish we got a whole bunch of these over the last 20 years.

<3HULK