Erotic Ben Affleck thriller called 'tepid' and 'baffling' in reviews from critics

Deep Water, starring Ben Affleck and Ana De Armas, has received mixed reviews from the critics.

The much-anticipated erotic thriller, which is also director Fatal Attraction director Adrian Lyne's first film since 2003, was originally scheduled for a cinema release in November 2020 but was repeatedly delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Affleck and No Time To Die star De Armas began dating in real life after meeting during production in early 2020, but later split up at the beginning of last year.

The film, which follows a couple as they fall out of love with each other, was eventually taken off the schedule and moved to a streaming release. It lands on Prime Video on Friday.

Read more: Everything new on Prime Video in March, 2022

Reviews of the film have largely been negative with Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian saying: "Deep Water looks like a huge amount of material has been shaped in the edit but there are odd gaps and elisions.

"De Armas behaves as if she’s in some saucy cologne commercial, and Affleck appears to have necked a hundredweight of Percocet before the cameras rolled."

Hanna Flint in Empire Magazine was similarly critical: "Despite his erotic thriller credentials, Lyne makes a tepid return to the director’s chair with a rather basic adaptation of an intriguing marital character study that Affleck struggles to enliven."

Gabriella Geisinger of Digital Spy was also less than enamoured by the film: "It's a shame that a film that purports to be an erotic thriller is neither sexy nor tense, and at just under two hours it feels like a waste of talent – not only Affleck and de Armas' but also of director Adrian Lyne, whose CV boasts far more sexually charged and dynamic stories than the tepid and shallow Deep Water."

However, there were some positive reviews. Clarisse Loughrey from The Independent have the film four stars and said Deep Water was "stubbornly and knowingly unsexy".

Steph Green for We Love Cinema also wrote: "It sadly doesn’t look poised to bring the erotic thriller back to the forefront, but Deep Water is a worthwhile addition to the canon nonetheless."

Deep Water can be streamed on Prime Video from 18 March.

Watch the trailer below: