DeepWater doesn’t pan out. It doesn’t add up. Not in a fun way: in an unsatisfying way.
, have apparently fizzled out. Whereas Melinda is left feeling bereft of the essentials . “He doesn’t want to control me like aman,” she complains to one of her boyfriends. What’s a girl got to do to get her bodice ripped around here? draws delight from the surprising irony of some of Melinda’s choices — for example, her taste for men played by the likes of Finn Whitrock and Jacob Elordi. That’s shade.
Lyne has proven himself capable of finding a satisfying psychological balance between sense and senselessness . Everything we didn’t explicitly know about Glenn Close’s notoriously crazy-sexy Alex Forrest, in, was only more effective for misleading us in the right ways, with the pendulum swinging from thinking she’s off her rocker to wondering “Can you blame her?” and back again.
De Armas’s Melinda — who drinks too much for her husband’s taste, and is more intriguing for all her mess — isn’t nearly as well-served. A better movie would be far more interested in Melinda than this movie is: in her vacillating attitudes and teasing admonishments and her brazenness; in the fact that her husband, who’s definitely a murderer , is far closer to their young daughter Trixie than she is. De Armas succeeds at giving us a Melinda who fills us with questions.
Instead, Lyne’s foreplay becomes bore-play. The Chekhov’s guns are polished and loaded and laid out, ready to fire any minute now, only for someone — the studio? the director? — to keep switching the safeties on. Psychological gaps pile up in the margins, untested. There’s enough there for you to make sense of the tantalizing thrillerseemingly strives to be, and enough to make you wonder why what’s missing has — like Melinda’s boyfriends — gone M.I.A.
It’s satisfying, still, to see de Armas make something appealing and properly mystifying of this character, underwritten as she is. And it’s fun to go along with the movie and buy into the idea that Vic’s public persona somehow pays off, however suspicious Affleck naturally makes us feel toward this guy. The Van Allens’ friends and neighbors are, for the most part, on Vic’s side in all of this, with one glaring exception.
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