Deep Water

Still waters run turgid in this limp psycho-sexual thriller starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas as a wealthy couple who get off in very twisted ways.

“Deep Water,” the new psycho-sexual thriller from long-dormant director Adrian Lyne (“Fatal Attraction,” “Unfaithful”), is being hyped for a couple of reasons: star Ben Affleck playing against type as a villain, and for its hard-R naughtiness featuring Ana de Armas as his vixen of a wife.

Turns out, neither one is that much of a selling point.

(The movie debuts on Hulu Friday.)

Affleck has played bad before, including a much more zesty turn in last year’s “The Last Duel,” and as a hitman in 2016’s “The Accountant.” Here he plays Vic Van Allen, a very still, passive man who puts up a pleasant veneer hiding a smoldering volcano of rage and resentment.

de Armas is probably the most appealing thing about the movie, a charismatic and erotic presence. She plays Melinda, Vic’s wife, who carries on numerous affairs with young, handsome men, one after another. This is done with Vic’s full awareness, if not exactly full blessing.

There’s a decent amount of sex in the movie, screenplay by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson, based upon the 1957 novel by Patricia Highsmith, whose novels exploring the creepy intersection of love, lust and hate have been turned into multiple movies, including “Strangers on a Train” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”

But it’s not especially hot or revealing of vast expanses of the actors’ flesh, at least to these eyes.

Lyne’s camera luridly caresses de Armas’ face and body in a very male gaze-y way. Melinda is a woman who every much likes to be looked at, and Vic, as the audience’s stand-in, returns the favor. There’s a fair amount of lingering shoe/feet glimpses to give things a fetishistic tang, though not to Tarantino-level ickyness.

Vic and Melinda have a very odd way of getting their rocks off. They sleep in separate bedrooms, apparently at her direction. She likes to discover new “friends,” many of them barely more than boys, invite them to parties and dance and flirt with them right under Vic’s eyes.

It’s only after whipping Vic into a high state of jealousy that she’ll allow him physical contact.

He protests that he does not mind, and they have an adorable 6-year-old daughter, Trixie (Grace Jenkins), that he dotes upon. But the hard gaze he casts upon Melinda and her beaus clearly demonstrate he’s not altogether right with it.

Given Melinda’s exhibitionism and Vic’s voyeuristic tendencies, you’d think their relationship would have eventually moved into a sphere where he watches her dalliances and they both are mutually satisfied. Instead it’s this yin-yang thing where their power dynamic is constantly in flux.

The movie doesn’t specify where they live, but I’d guess Martha’s Vineyard or some other enclave of the uber-wealthy. Vic was a computer chip designer who got rich making the technology for military drones and retired early. Mostly he putters around, taking care of Trixie, doing most of the cooking, and dabbles with photography and poetry.

One of his hobbies is raising snails, and has a vast display of aquariums and moist growing containers in his garage. I guess Vic is much like a gastropod himself, seemingly hardly moving at all and living in the environment he secretes. But as we’ll see, he is capable of big feats.

As the story opens, one of Melinda’s “friends” disappeared a month or so ago. Vic doesn’t much care for Melinda’s newest fling, Joel (Brendan Miller), a callow and stupid blond dude, so as a joke he claims that he killed the guy. It scares the lad off, Vic gets his chuckle, and soon their circle of friends are making jokes about what a killer he is.

(Lil Rel Howery and Dash Mihok play his two closest buddies.)

But when Melinda’s newest flame turns up very publicly dead, she accuses Vic of doing the deed. The police have no witnesses, so nothing happens, although one of the people whose suspicions are raised is Don (the always-great Tracy Letts), an older and pompous writer who thinks he sees a good yarn.

The movie keeps things in doubt as to Vic’s actual guilt, though he does an awful lot of staring and following for somebody with nothing to hide. This begins to play into the rotting nature of his marriage to Melinda, who was at first horrified but now sees this as a new wrinkle she can use to tease and torture Vic.

“If you think I killed Charlie, aren’t you frightened of me?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “Because I’m the thing you killed for.”

“Deep Water” is really slow burn — the plot doesn’t so much thicken as congeal. At two hours it could easily lose 30 minutes of screen time, much of it shots of Vic gazing at Melinda. At some point we accept the twisted nature of their marriage, and just want something else to happen.

Affleck may be tabbed as “the bad guy” in this movie, but in a way de Armas’ Melinda is equally depraved. She enjoys her unearned wealth and leisure, drinks too much and sleeps around, is an itinerantly involved mother and takes pleasure from her husband’s pain.

The two are obviously made for each other, but less clear is who or how this movie is meant to entertain.