A quick way to alcohol poisoning would be a drinking game where you take a shot every time there’s a long closeup in this film of Ben Affleck looking silently unshaven, disgusted and also turned on, yet not turned on enough to change that slack-jawed facial expression in any meaningful way. Legendary British director Adrian Lyne has returned to film-making after a 20-year gap with this laboriously paced and sometimes bafflingly edited erotic thriller, based on the 1957 novel by Patricia Highsmith. It was last filmed in 1981 as Eaux Profondes with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Isabelle Huppert, this time Affleck and Ana de Armas are the couple in a toxically and then murderously dysfunctional open marriage.
Affleck plays Vic Van Allen, a super-wealthy tech guy who lives in a rather Updikean circle of well-to-do attractive couples; he retired young with little to do other than obsess about his gorgeous, free-spirited wife Melinda (De Armas) and her flagrant extramarital flirtations and flings; the understanding is that she is open about it with him, and Vic has persuaded himself that this excites him, but he is secretly becoming more and more enraged.
