Film review: Phantom of the Open

Another British comedy about a sporting underdog starring Mark Rylance

Twenty years since Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction, 9½ Weeks) last made a movie, he is back with this adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1957 novel Deep Water, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph. The setting has been moved from 1950s New England to present-day New Orleans, where an unhappily married couple, Vic (Ben Affleck) and Melinda (Ana de Armas), are living in a “blithe cocoon of wealth”. He is a tech millionaire who got rich by developing chips for military drones, while she is a “shameless vixen” many years his junior, whose “serial infidelities” – conducted under his nose – may, or may not, be driving him to bump off her lovers. De Armas is “magnetic”, but her character “obstinately refuses” to develop; ultimately there’s something a bit dated about her “femme-fatale-ish” unknowability and “crackling sexuality”. The film has “glossy watchability” in spades, and the fact that the co-stars have dated in real life does add “frisson” – but the finale is a “hodgepodge” that overshadows the beginning’s “playful promise”.

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