Vic and Melinda Van Allen are deeply in love. And occasionally with each other.
Well, that’s a bit misleading. Vic—a wealthy, retired chip developer—loves his wife deeply, and almost exclusively. Melinda, it would seem, is not so discriminating.
Oh, she loves Vic. At least she says she does. Sometimes she even acts like she does.
But she cavorts with some, uh, friends as well. She and these other guys hug. They flirt. They kiss. Maybe more.
Vic doesn’t ask about the maybe more part. When he and Melinda married, he promised himself, and her, that he’d treat her like an adult, not some kept woman. She could go out with whomever whenever she pleased. He was secure enough in their relationship to never ask about the who or the when or (most potentially awkward) the why. He doesn’t know what they’re up to. He doesn’t want to.
So he says.
But his friends are getting worried. Melinda, cavorting so publicly with her male (ahem) friends is embarrassing. “You got to rein Melinda in,” one says. And all this outside-marriage cavorting? It’s beginning to eat at him.
At a party, Melinda spends most of the evening with Joel, a barely-legal guy with shoulder-length hair. “You’re a brick with how nice you are about me seeing your wife,” Joel tells Vic. And when Vic gives him a sideways ice stare, he quickly amends. “It’s all innocent, of course. But some guys—some husbands …”
Vic interjects. Does Joel remember a guy named Martin McCray, by any chance? Yeah, that’s right. The guy who disappeared.
“He started seeing a lot of my wife,” Vic tells him. “They were friends.” And then, as the awkward conversation continues for another beat or two, Vic drops the other shoe.
“I killed him.”
Joel doesn’t quite know how to respond.
“I don’t believe you,” Joel stammers.
“Then don’t,” Vic tells him, and he walks away.
Soon thereafter, Joel announces he’s moving to New Mexico. Greener pastures and all that.
But Melinda’s not one to stop gathering in friends. And someday, one might decide to stick around—and see just how viable Vic’s threats are.
Role models here are fairly sparse. But I’ll say this much: Chelsea, the Van Allen’s babysitter—who stays with 6-year-old Trixie as Melinda carouses and Vic spies—is seriously dedicated to her job. Those nights, after all, can get pretty long.
None.
Vic and Melinda’s marriage is … complicated. They don’t have an open marriage, exactly. It’s more of a don’t ask, don’t tell sort of thing. Or maybe it lands somewhere between the two.
“You wish I was normal, Melinda?” Vic asks her one night during dinner as Joel awkwardly eats a grilled cheese. “Because if I was normal, I don’t think that Joel would be over for dinner with us.”
We see Melinda and her beaus (including her husband) do more than eat, naturally.
Melinda is shown a few times in stages of undress. In one scene, she wears just a pair of panties, with her breasts visible. She goes topless elsewhere, with the sides of her breasts shown to the camera (and to the babysitter, incidentally. When Vic suggests that she put a top on, Melinda tells him to not be so “suffocating”.) We see her begin to take her garments off during several scenes, baring her shoulders.
Melinda has sex several times during the film—scenes filled with suggestive movements. And despite the unspoken don’t tell part of her and Vic’s marriage, she talks about her experiences quite often, using crass and provocative language to do so.
Scenes elsewhere involve other sexual interactions and activities, sometimes in public. Melinda also flirts relentlessly with whoever her paramour du jour.
Male characters sometimes are seen shirtless. Women wear bikinis, risqué swimwear and clingy, revealing dresses. A woman tells Vic that she’s getting a lot of “cleavage action” because of the dress she’s wearing. Melinda sultrily shaves her legs in a bathtub. Vic dances with another woman at a party and seems to enjoy himself—making Melinda quite jealous. (She later asks if he wanted to have sex with her. After some hemming and hawing, he admits that it had occurred to him.) We see some sultry-if-indistinct pictures of Melinda.
[The following section contains spoilers.]
After Vic tells Joel he killed Martin McCray, Joel apparently tells others. Soon, rumors that Vic’s a murderer begin to fly around town. Vic passes the whole remark off as a joke, and he’s soon exonerated: Vic originally told Joel that he killed the guy with a hammer, but when Martin’s body turns up later, he was shot to death (and the killer caught shortly thereafter).
But perhaps the faux threat gave Vic ideas.
He drowns one of his wife’s paramours in a friend’s pool during a rainstorm. While we don’t see the murder initially, the movie sends us on several flashbacks, leaving no question as to who did what. When Melinda discovers the body (floating face down in the pool), several people (including Vic) run out—most hoping to revive the guy. But when they try to lift him out of the pool, someone loses his grip and the victim’s head slams into the pool’s edge. (“It didn’t affect the death,” the dropper says defensively. “Didn’t help,” someone else says.) When Vic tries to perform CPR, Melinda pushes him away—telling him he wasn’t even trying hard—and when someone else tries, she gets in the way again and is accidentally hit in the nose.
It’s not the last fatality. Vic goes after someone else—hitting him in the head with a thrown stone. He then picks up another, much bigger stone in an apparent attempt to crack the guy’s head open. Turns out, the threat was enough: The man tries to run away and, in his panic, tumbles down a steep embankment—hitting his head near the bottom. (The blood and half-open eyes clearly indicate the guy is dead.) The body is manipulated for disposal, with Vic tying the corpse’s hands around a rock with a belt. Later, the bloated body makes another appearance in the nearby river, floating grotesquely.
Another man, trying to avoid an obstacle in the road, careens off course and plunges off a gorge wall and into the waiting river below. (We don’t see the body, but the driver is presumed dead.)
Melinda ineffectually hits Vic several times during a drive home. She tells him (vindictively) that a bout of lovemaking with someone else left a bruise, and she invites him to look.
When someone suggests carting up some of Vic’s beloved snails and eat them for dinner, Vic says that they’d poison anyone who ate them: You need to starve snails so they don’t have anything in their digestive tracts for them to be safe to eat.
Melinda cruelly bites a man’s most sensitive body part twice. Someone burns a finger when reaching for a just-out-of-the-oven cookie. We hear that Vic designed a chip for military drones, and several people talk about how those drones are often used to kill people. We hear a reference to suicide. Someone steps on a snail.
Nearly 40 f-words and about five s-words. We also hear “a–,” “h—” and five pairings of God’s name with “d–n.” God’s name and Jesus’ name are each misused twice elsewhere, too.
Melinda recalls (for one of her boyfriends who’s over for dinner) that she ordered a grilled cheese sandwich during one of her first dates with Vic—much to his disappointment, she needles. As if he didn’t like her for who she was. He needles her right back: She often orders off the children’s menu, Vic tells the guest, “to save room for alcohol.”
It seems she has plenty of room … and plenty of practice filling it. At a party, a friend of Vic’s says, “Your lady’s drunk, and she’s standing on top of my piano.” After another soiree, she complains about how drunk she is. It seems that Melinda wakes up with a hangover most mornings (and is thus especially annoyed with her and Vic’s boisterous daughter, Trixie), and it seems that most of her interactions with her lovers are done under the influence of alcohol. “I don’t remember all that we did,” she later tells Vic after one such interlude, “But it was really awesome.” (She smokes cigarettes, too.)
Most dinners they share (either alone or with others) feature wine. (During one such dinner, Melinda stalks off, clutching the wine bottle in her hand.) She and Vic hang with an upper-crust, party-hardy crowd. They seem to attend parties every other night, and those shindigs are filled with all manner of flowing liquor: We see people hold and imbibe beer, wine, martinis, champagne, alcoholic shots and loads of mixed drinks.
Oh, and while Melinda insists to someone that Vic doesn’t drink, Vic does pour a glass of wine for 6-year-old Trixie, so they can toast and celebrate (as he tells Melinda) “life”.
At least one of Vic’s friends uses marijuana during a party. (He’s stunned that he’s sitting outside in the rain, blaming the weed for not noticing sooner.) Vic and others may smoke, too, and it’s possible that some freshly baked cookies contain marijuana. (When police later stop by for a visit, they ask if marijuana was being used during the evening; when there’s some reluctance to speak up, one officer says that they’re not as interested in that as they are in the party’s other activities.)
Several people lie and mislead. Trixie tells her dad that her new dog smells like “poo.” Chelsea teaches Trixie how to play poker.
Marriages can be funny things.
I’m not using funny in a negative context, by the way. I’d imagine that they’re a little like snowflakes: No two are exactly alike. And that’s to be expected. God made us all different, after all. Our relationships can hardly be expected to be cookie-cutter shapes of each other. We all have our quirks.
But according to Scripture, God intended us to be monogamous, too. And when we go off God’s generous script, relationships can go funny the same way fish left out for a month in the sun can.
On that level, I suppose you could call Deep Water something of a cautionary tale. Vic seems to pride himself on not being too watchful of his wife’s habits, not too jealous of his wife’s friends. “I don’t feel the need to dictate her choices,” he tells someone. At times, both he and Melinda seem proud that they’ve sluffed off such anachronistic relics of a Judeo-Christian society—embracing instead a more open-ended marriage that they intended.
Alas, when our intentions don’t match with God’s intent, things can get messy. Even murdery.
And that’s the cautionary message you could pluck from this Deep Water. Unfortunately, like a fisherman trying to catch trout in a swamp by the highway, viewers will pull up much, much more than this dubious lesson.
Deep Water is filled with sex and nudity, language and violence. It’s a bit of a mess as a movie, too. Despite an honestly creepy turn by star Ben Affleck, this erotic thriller seems at times to want to be a comedy. But in a film like this, you’ve got to choose, not just make, a half-hearted feint in a comic direction. (You could say that both Melinda and the film can feel rather indecisive.) And Deep Water’s grim, titillating storyline and its boatload of content is not, ultimately, particularly funny.
All this and more ultimately sinks Deep Water. And as is the case with many things that come to rest in the murky depths, really no point in dragging them back up again.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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