Deep Water: Cross Between Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and an SNL Sketch That Somehow Works

This film presents an askew world that can be so jarring, it comes back to being unintentionally humorous before settling into a tense plot. If I didn’t know it came from two masterminds of the psychological thriller genre who knew what they were doing — the source material by novelist Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, Talented Mr Ripley) and Adrian Lyne as director (Fatal Attraction)-I would describe this as an extremely bizarre cross between the 2009 Saturday Night Live sketch “I Have Sex with Your Wife” and the 1966 classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in which an older couple (George and Martha, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton) unleash a 90-minute burst of raw, sociopathic marital dysfunction on an unassuming young couple they’ve invited to dinner.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64FG1dt8C9s&t=193s

The key players are Vic (Ben Affleck), a lower middle-aged entrepreneur who’s now a member of the idle rich after retiring off a technological invention. His wife, Melinda, (Ana de Armas) is a gorgeous firecracker with a voracious sexual appetite who seems to get off on having affairs right under her husband’s nose.

It’s initially kind of vague whether seeing her wife gallivant with other men in such close proximity is something he welcomes as a kink or just tolerates it, but yikes! These two need therapy before things get all murdery and out of hand.