Adri­an Lyne will make his return with a Ben Affleck erot­ic thriller

They don’t make movies like they used to, but in the case of the erot­ic thriller, they bare­ly make them at all. The steamy-sleazy sub­genre enjoyed a spike in pop­u­lar­i­ty dur­ing the ​’90s, due in no small part to the efforts of film­mak­er Adri­an Lyne, but has since fall­en into sad dis­re­pair under the but­toned-up Hol­ly­wood par­a­digms of today.

Lyne’s been out of the game since 2002, when he guid­ed Diane Lane to an Oscar nom­i­na­tion for Unfaith­ful, but the direc­tor behind such lurid gems as 9 ¹⁄₂ Weeks, Fatal Attrac­tion, and Inde­cent Pro­pos­al is com­ing back. And he’s bring­ing the erot­ic thriller with him.

He’ll mount a sin­gle­hand­ed revival with a new fea­ture cur­rent­ly titled Deep Water, accord­ing to a new exclu­sive from Dead­line. This isn’t some rinky-dink ​“washed-up tal­ent slum­ming it on the no-bud­get out­skirts” oper­a­tion, either; he’s got full financ­ing from New Regent, and has already tapped bona fide stars Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas to headline.

They’ll play mar­ried cou­ple Vic and Melin­da Van Allen, locked in a love­less union sus­tained only by a mutu­al agree­ment to sleep with oth­er peo­ple. But as corpses begin mys­te­ri­ous­ly pil­ing up around them, they must inspect the fault lines in the nuclear Amer­i­can fam­i­ly as the enmi­ty between them only con­tin­ues to grow.

In case all of the sexy duplic­i­tous­ness wasn’t a dead give­away, this sto­ry has been adapt­ed from a nov­el by Patri­cia High­smith, the sus­pense vir­tu­oso behind The Tal­ent­ed Mr. Rip­ley and Strangers on a Train. For added libido, the script will be drawn up by Stranger Than Fic­tion scribe Zack Helm along with Sam Levin­son, showrun­ner of HBO’s hor­mone-fueled Euphoria.

The note­wor­thy names attached to the project have made it one to keep an eye on, but it’s most intrigu­ing for its anachro­nis­tic qual­i­ty. When­ev­er the odd erot­ic thriller sneaks into mul­ti­plex­es (2017’s Unfor­get­table, for one), it feels like a holdover from a cou­ple decades ear­li­er, and with Lyne back behind the cam­era, that feel­ing will come straight from the source.