After a twenty-year hiatus from filmmaking (save for a brief stab at screenwriting in Alex Pettyfer’s Back Roads), one of the few directors that could actually get his head around erotic mainstream cinema, Adrian Lyne, has returned. And true to his sweaty and mentally fucked-up trappings, it’s an unsettling take on the idea of romance, but there's a fair bit of rust showing through as well.
It’s easy to point at Ben Affleck’s role here as cuckolded husband Vic (and unlike the majority of the uses of that term nowadays, I mean it literally here) and draw comparisons to his similar presence in Gone Girl. Eigil Bryld’s washed-out colours in the cinematography certainly add to that, as does the subtext that he and Ana de Armas as Melinda are staying together for the sake of their kid (which almost qualifies this as a spiritual sequel to Gone Girl), but that’s not what I primarily got out of it.
More so than anything that recent, Affleck’s role here reminded me of his turn in Chasing Amy. Like Holden in that film, Vic is getting to the point of obsessive jealousy over his partner’s sexual history, only here, it’s due to an arrangement they themselves established with their open marriage. It really lays into his feelings of inadequacy, not helped by how freely Melinda rubs her extramarital relationships in his face (among other things), and when it’s brought next to his background designing computer chips for military drones, there’s a real sense that he’s used to hand-waving the damage that can be done by his own actions, indirectly or otherwise.
A fair amount of the film, initially at least, is set up to cast ambiguity on just how far Vic takes that feeling of jealousy and lost passion… I think? The script for this isn’t particularly clever or subtle, so any revelations feel like a foregone conclusion, making the tension in the presentation and atmosphere a lot looser than it feels like it should be. And that’s just on the thriller side of things; erotically, while it benefits from the casting, it’s strangely muted. It feels odd to wish that a film had more sleaze, but maybe my brain’s been rotted from seeing two 365 Days films in the space of a single year.
However, as more of a psychological
examination of a monumentally messed-up relationship, there’s enough here to
make the whole endeavour seem worthwhile. It makes for quite the indictment on
male fragility, not to mention the lengths that couples can go to just to avoid
the obvious solution, all while not directly making out open marriages
in general to be the source of the problem. It’s just something that made the
already-existent issues even more prevalent, to the point of bringing this
doomed relationship into the realms of Island Of Death.
This is definitely an odd one. While Zach Helm and Sam Levinson’s writing probably didn’t do the adaptation process any favors (they’ve both been pointed out as lacking in the characterisation department in past works, and this is more of the same on that front), the visuals, acting, surprisingly fruity soundtrack, and intriguing (albeit stretched) depiction of a toxic relationship manage to smooth things out. It’s not amazing, but considering the averages for its genre, you could do a hell of a lot worse.
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