In Love & Deep Water Review: Aoi Miyazaki, Ryo Yoshizawa's Film Is An Annoying Muddle Mystery

In Love & Deep Water Review: Sparks of humour in an otherwise drab and pointless rom-com do not amount to much except a harmless diversion. In Love & Deep Water is Japanese director Y?suke Taki’s homage to silliness. He has been there, done it before in Girl Gun Lady. This time he is on very slippery ground.

A rom-com or murder mystery?

It is set on board a luxury cruiser and it seems to have been shot on location in an ocean where sadly, all intelligence and logic are drowned in commotion .

Early in the voyage of the dimmed, a character mentions Milan Kundera's classic novel on existentialism, The Unbearable Light Of Being. This, I thought was a clever joke in a film that has nothing to do even remotely with anything intellectual. Tragically even as a massy OTT time-pass template, the humour and the sense of mischief are drowned in the azure ocean that pops up each time the characters are on the dock. The cabins are obviously in a studio.

The plot is centred on a butler Suguru (Ryo Yoshizawa) who epitomizes suave servility attending obediently to every beck and call of the rich and the famous onboard.

The only likeable moments in the muddle mystery are the conversations between Suguru and a solemn little boy, Kanoto (Yunho), who is on board as a companion to a wealthy little girl in whose family a murder occurs not before long. The boy wisely questions Suguro’s unquestioning servility and empathizes with Suguro’s task of uninterrupted obsequiousness.

Sadly the boy has little to do later, as a tycoon is bumped off by his shrewish daughter, whom he has disinherited. She drowns him in the cruiser’s swimming pool. As they say, where there is a will, there is a disgruntled relative.

This is the murder mystery…well, actually no mystery; we know whodunit.

Then there is the love story between Suguro and a chirpy borderline obnoxious girl named Chizuru (Aoi Miyazaki). What binds Suguro and Chizuro together is that they have both been dumped by their respective partners. The ditchers are now seeing one another.

Final Verdict

I see neither humour in the romance nor intrigue in the murder. All I see is that in trying to be a murder romance, In Love & Deep Water ends up being neither. The performances barring the male lead and the kid are exasperatingly hammy. Japanese cinema is known to probe emotional subjects with a keen sensitivity. This one reads like a let’s-have-some-fun aberration. It is like seeing Sooraj Barjatya at a bar trying to be young and happening. Just not happening.