Ben Affleck's New Movie Confirms His Best Genre Is Now...Erotic Thrillers?
WARNING: Spoilers ahead for Deep Water (2022)!
With Deep Water and Gone Girl, Ben Affleck is proving that his best new film genre is erotic psychological thrillers. Although the genre’s heyday was primarily in the 1990s, Fatal Attraction director Adrian Lyne returned to the screen after a 20-year hiatus to helm the erotic thriller Deep Water, starring Ben and Affleck and Ana de Armas as a dysfunctional married couple who play increasingly dangerous mind-games. Relying on the performances of its leads, the mixed-reviewed conflict of Disney's 2022 movie Deep Water still proves that both Affleck and de Armas have solidified a place in modern erotic thrillers.
Considering Ben Affleck has been one of Hollywood’s top actors since the 1990s, the movie star has ventured into a variety of genres throughout this career. From dramas to war films or superhero movies, Affleck has been able to adapt his talents to different styles throughout various phases of his career, with some of his more recent successes being in roles where he plays a brooding, largely unsympathetic husband in which his real-life persona is used to elevate the character. In the past decade, two of the best examples of these fitting roles for Affleck have been in the sexually-charged psychological thrillers Gone Girl (2014) and Deep Water (2022).
Unsurprisingly, Affleck’s role as Vic Van Allen has been compared to his performance in David Fincher’s cult classic thriller Gone Girl, in which Affleck played Nick Dunne, who was suspected of killing his wife, Amy. While Affleck surprisingly turns out to be the more sane character in Gone Girl, his persona, style of purveying an indifferent demeanor to the torrid events, and even-tempered nice-guy disposition were perfect for the role, as they continually made viewers question whether he was guilty or not. Even though Deep Water’s twisted conflict pales in comparison to Gone Girl, the 2022 erotic thriller perfectly repeats these circumstances for Affleck’s talents, making viewers question in the beginning whether he was responsible for killing the lovers of Ana de Armas’ Deep Water character. While there’s been a lack of erotic thrillers for larger studios, Affleck’s recent projects suggest he could begin a resurgence in the genre thanks to his seemingly natural affinity for the subject matter.
Director David Fincher revealed that part of the reason he cast movie star Ben Affleck in Gone Girl was because of his real-life awkward grin in public, which provides a level of suspicion and tension for Nick Dunne that also lends itself perfectly to Deep Water. In both thrillers, Affleck’s character is under suspicion of murder, though he actually does turn out to be the more homicidal, unhinged spouse in Deep Water. Both roles require a level of emotional apathy in relation to his characters’ wives that makes him a strange anti-hero, and Affleck is one of the only leading men in Hollywood who has proved to accomplish this so effortlessly on multiple occasions.
There’s a certain type of charm and charisma that the leading man in an erotic psychological thriller needs to have, and once directors see that they do, the actors such as Ben Affleck typically keep being cast in these tense roles. This was certainly the case with Michael Douglas in the 1980s and 1990s, who starred in Deep Water director Adrian Lyne’s best erotic thriller to date, Fatal Attraction. Douglas kept getting these same roles, not all of which were successful, but still worked to maintain him as one of Hollywood’s leading men into his 50s–which is a phase Affleck is now entering. Since Ben Affleck has begun a stage in his career where many of his roles surround bored men who become entangled in dangerous situations, erotic thriller-style films like Gone Girl and Deep Water may suit his talents best.