10 Recent Movie Scenes Everyone Misunderstood
1. Vic Is Obsessed With Snails Because The Author Is - Deep Water
The new Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas-starring erotic thriller Deep Water is truly one of the strangest and most mystifying films of the past year, and has left most viewers questioning what the hell was going on with all those damn snails.
Protagonist Vic Van Allen (Affleck), beyond being a violently jealous psychopath, has a bizarre fascination with snails, keeping dozens of pet snails in a series of tanks in a specially designed room.
Despite an early implication that the snails might be used as poison later in the film, they're ultimately a complete red herring, and seem to be a mere character flourish to assure the audience that Vic is a bit of an oddball.
Viewers might simply assume the snails are supposed to possess a purely symbolic quality, as at one point Vic notes, "A snail will climb a 12-foot wall to find its mate," paralleling Vic's own possessiveness of his wife Melinda (Ana de Armas).
But there's actually an altogether different explanation for the snails' presence in the film - Patricia Highsmith, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, was absolutely obsessed with snails in real life.
During her life Highsmith bred around 300 snails in the garden of her home, and even once famously attended a London cocktail party with a handbag full of 100 snails as her "companions."
She also published the short story "The Snail-Watcher," focused on a snail-obsessed man, and so the presence of snails in the film are a rather peculiar homage to the author's own snail-mania.