![]() De Armas, playing a maybe-unsuspecting fatale who sets a near-platoon of tall, handsome, bolts-for-brains men on the path to their senseless deaths, also counts for quite a bit. Affleck smile-grimacing his way through an everyday rich guy/closet-psycho routine for two hours also counts for… something. I laughed more than I was supposed to, which has to count for something. This is not to sound ungrateful for the accidental marks the movie’s got in its favor. The ingredients are largely there, but by even the standards of a genre that no one insists should make complete sense, the movie doesn’t really make sense. ![]() Not in a fun way: in an unsatisfying way. There are no ticket stubs in hell, only algorithms that promise not to leak our watch histories to the devil (and then do it anyway). The genre that lulls us into feeling like we’re cheating on “better” movies with so-called trash - and makes the infidelity forgivable. If any genre should be thriving in the Netflix era, it’s the genre that a respectable adult might prefer to watch at home to mitigate the guilt of such guilty pleasures. Erotic thrillers in their heyday were, after all, routine beneficiaries of the direct-to-video pipeline the theatrical successes of iconic high-grossers, like Basic Instinct and Lyne’s own Fatal Attraction, obscure this fact. Even the fact of the movie’s same-day release in theaters and on Hulu feels appropriate. This wasn’t necessarily a bad omen, the reality of pandemic-era moviegoing being what it is. Never mind that the release of the Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas thriller Deep Water - director Adrian Lyne’s first movie since Unfaithful 20 years ago - was repeatedly delayed. ![]() Maybe the erotic thriller isn’t dead after all, they said. The return of a master of the genre, they said. ![]()
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