*This piece is part of our Critics In Conversation series, where two writers offer different perspectives on the same film. Read Wesley Stenzel’s review here, and Ryan Coleman’s review here.*
They represent fertility. They illustrate slow and determined movement. They’re the progress of life. The sacred space of the home.
They’re snails. Obviously.
Strangely enough, these slimy and unsuspecting creatures also become the most erotic and thrilling aspect of Hulu’s erotic thriller Deep Water. Running deep with snail symbolism, the film directly parallels these common garden leeches with the broody Vic (Ben Affleck) and his slow-moving resolve to keep his adventurous wife Melinda (Ana de Armas) from her affairs to maintain a picture-perfect family. It doesn’t matter how many of his wife’s boyfriends he must kill to keep their marriage intact.
“A snail will climb a 12-foot wall to find its mate,” Vic says while admiring his snail collection.
Coated in green hues and flowing with shots of rippling gorges, Deep Water stays true to its title. Everything about its New Orleans setting is wet, viridescent, and dripping with the potential for intrigue and lust. As Vic’s growing jealousy turns violent, he becomes a prime suspect in the disappearance of Melinda’s lovers and turns to the only specimen in his household that he can control–his pet snails. Yep, no way to make that not weird. During Melinda’s many sexscapades, Vic escapes to his garage-turned greenhouse where he breeds and longingly caresses his snails. Surrounded by steamy glass tanks and dripping greenery, the snails appear downright seductive as they slide up and down Vic’s fingertips. They connect with him in all the ways Melinda doesn’t.
These unique visuals are the work of veteran genre director Adrian Lyne who hired an expert in all things snails to effectively fuel Vic’s unusual hobby. He eventually stumbled upon adviser Max Anton who accumulated many other nicknames while filming: “the snail wrangler,” “the snail whisperer,” and “mollusk man.” Anton brought a whopping 150 snails to the set and provided the cast and crew with his extensive knowledge of gastropods. But alas, the snails were not Lyne’s idea, nor were they a detail from the film’s writer duo Zach Helm and Sam Levinson.
The snails belong to Patricia Highsmith, the author of the original 1957 novel for which Lyne’s film is based. As it turns out, Highsmith also had an affinity for snails and “what others found repulsive and nauseating.” In fact, she even had a few pet snails of her own. While walking in New York in 1946, Highsmith discovered two snails mating and became so awestruck, she immediately took them home, stuck them in a fishbowl, and continued to observe their sticky copulation.
“They give me a sort of tranquility,” Highsmith once wrote of snails. “It is quite impossible to tell which is the male and which is the female, because their behavior and appearance are exactly the same.”
Perhaps that’s exactly what inspired her story’s reversal of typical American gender roles. Though Vic is “rich as f-ck” from developing a computer chip that helps military drones find and kill targets, he also takes on the role of the homemaker. He prepares every meal, drives his adorable daughter Trixie (Grace Jenkins) to school, and maintains the house. But Melinda spends most of her nights out on the town, drinking and partying–behaviors that most films about marriage attribute to disloyal husbands. While Vic is dead set on attaining his ideal family, Melinda wants more: “America’s so suffocating.” She searches for passion and power in relationships with other men who she hopes will let her be wild and reckless unlike the prim and proper trophy wife Vic expects her to be for his socialite friends.
“Joel might be dumb, but he makes me enjoy who I am, and that turns me on,” she tells Vic during one of their arguments.
But like a snail, Vic still carries the weight of his home on his shoulders. When he begins to kill off Melinda’s lovers, his family’s reputation and his manhood hang in the balance of the film. And on the walls of his home. When Vic tucks Trixie into bed during one of Melinda’s rendezvous, we spot a framed painting of a little girl riding on a life-size snail in her room. Like most children raised in abusive households, Trixie witnesses everything wrong with her parents’ relationship and knows too much for her age. This detail, hidden in plain sight, shows that Trixie is a product of the toxic environment that surrounds her, so much so that she even happily accepts her father’s murderous tendencies: “I still think you drowned him; you’re just telling me you didn’t.”
Even when Vic isn’t fantasizing about soft-core snail snogging, snails continue to follow him as he secretly kills off Melinda’s lovers. As Vic erratically drives her latest pretty boy plaything Tony (Finn Wittrock) to his timeless end at the gorge, the empty snail shells in the backseat of his car spill over, indicating his overflowing, albeit frightening amount of passion, for Melinda.
But no secret can stay secret forever. When Melinda later uncovers evidence of the missing Tony in Vic’s snail haven, she ends up stepping on one of his gastropod pets, crushing it with her foot. This is the moment she can finally end their marriage. She acts and calls neighborhood skeptic Don (Tracy Letts) for back-up.
After a highly unsuspenseful bike and car chase between Vic and Don that ends with Don driving off a cliff and landing in deep water (lol), Vic still returns to his home unscathed. As he quickly strips his clothes on the front porch, he catches Melinda seated on the spiral stairwell, watching him.
They exchange the same words they did in the film’s cold open.
“What?” asks Vic.
“Nothing,” she responds.
With that, Melinda ascends the spiral staircase, a shape not so different from the curving design etched into the shell of a mollusk. By starting and ending with this scene, Lyne pinpoints the cyclical pattern toxic relationships follow. One of abusive behaviors, loving contrition, and dangerous outbursts. This isn’t the first time Vic has lashed out, and it won’t be the last.
While Deep Water is the most extreme form of this wildly unhealthy pattern, it shows audiences that toxic partners are never quite what they seem. What at first feels like love can emerge from its shell to be something far darker. Something criminal. Something that moves at a snail’s pace.