Deep Water (2022) summary and ending explained

Deep Water is a psychological thriller that follows Vic and his wife Melinda in their unusual marriage and the even more unusual deaths around them. The film is now streaming on Prime Video.

Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers

Plot summary

The movie opens off with Melinda (Ana De Armas) and Vic (Ben Affleck) going on with their daily routine, just like an everyday couple. However, the viewers are immediately shown that this isn’t the case. Their lives contradict normalcy, and the couple loves mentioning that fact constantly.

We are illuminated with the fact that Melinda and Vic are in an open marriage and Melinda repeatedly has relations with other men. Although Vic tries to put up a front that he is comfortable with this arrangement, he is jealous.

Melinda gets a kick out of making Vic jealous, as that is the only leverage she has. Vic is revealed to be a wealthy man, which was due to him developing a chip that controlled war drones. He is also a suspected egoistic person, who takes pleasure in joking about suspicious topics such as murdering a mutual friend. This makes Melinda extremely uncomfortable.

The couple frequently attends house parties and are very social. These parties lead to many things, good and bad. Melinda is seen kissing another man, Joel, who Vic despises. However, Vic pretends to support her decisions and not reign her in.

It is observed that Vic constantly mentions that Joel is slow or dull. He then threatens Joel in private, eventually driving him away. Annoyed, Melinda moves on to her next interest, Charlie, a pianist.

Vic notices that Charlie is smarter and more talented than Joel. Thus, he closes in on his prey. At a pool party held in a friend’s house, Vic waits for the opportune moment to corner Charlie and successfully drowns him in the pool.

Melinda and another friend, Don, suspect and accuse Vic in front of the authorities, but in vain. They also hire a private investigator to keep tabs on Vic, which he swiftly discovers and puts an end to.

Melinda seeks out another man, Tony, an ex-boyfriend next. Vic instantly realises that Tony is the smartest of all the men yet. He lures Tony in his car by pretending that Melinda was asking for him, thus moving in on his kill.

If you have any doubts about the ending, here’s a full breakdown.

Deep Water ending explained in detail:

Rocky trails

Vic drives Tony through an abandoned forest trail on the pretence that Melinda would be meeting them at their destination. After a terrifying and rash drive there, a shaken Tony stumbles out to find nobody waiting.

Just as he turns around, he gets a rock thrown at his face, injuring his head. Stunned, he begs Vic to stop but fails to escape him. Vic then pushes Tony off the face of a dangerous cliff. Tony falls and hits his head on a sharp rock, which kills him.

Barely deep water

Vic now drags Tony’s lifeless body into the stream flowing next to the cliff. He ties his limbs up and tries to drown the body by weighing it down with rocks. He then steals Tony’s wallet and flees the murder scene.

He goes home and pretends to hear nothing of Tony, but also constantly checks with Melinda regarding his whereabouts. This eventually gets Melinda’s suspicions stirred.

The next day, Melinda suggests that the couple and their daughter could take a picnic to the same spot. He reluctantly agrees. When they get there, Vic discovers that the body was barely hidden by the flowing water.

He panics but decides to deal with the situation another time, without his family being present there.

The panic before the storm

After leaving the picnic spot, Melinda notices that she forgot her scarf, to which Vic assures that he would go back to and fetch.

However, when he arrives there the next day, he gets to work on the body, now visible beneath the water surface. He is in the middle of submerging the body again when Don suddenly arrives and catches him red-handed. Don flees in his car, with Vic trailing closely behind him in his bike.

He and Don enter a spiralling, descending chase through the forest. Vic knew the route quite well and blindsided Don. The chase ultimately ended in Don losing control of his car and falling to his death off the cliff, into the same stream.

Back home, Melinda discovers Tony’s wallet in Vic’s possession and her looming fears of Vic being a murderer are confirmed. However, she lies and pretends to be in the dark. This could have been to protect herself from Vic or to simply accept her fate, and live her life like she always has been.


Also Read: Windfall (2022) summary and ending explained

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