In Love and Deep Water should have been developed as a series because the movie could not do justice to all the subplots the writers wanted to explore. There are also many crucial answers to the characters’ personalities that the audience is not provided with, and overall, it felt like the movie was given a choppy edit. That can be debated, but until then, here is the summary and ending of In Love and Deep Water.
Spoiler Alert
Who are the people on the cruise?
Let’s start with Ubukata, who is the primary voice of the story. He is a butler on board the ship and is known for being the perfect lightning rod, which means that he is best suited to handle the guests’ unreasonable demands. To be more specific, this means that there are certain guests who get a kick out of insulting the staff and asserting their own superiority. Ubukata is the one who can handle them without getting triggered or riled up. He often comes across as someone with no self-respect because of this very reason, but the captain appreciates him in a way that benefits her ship and her own image for the show that she is shooting.
The next person is Chizuru, who boards the ship to stop her boyfriend from cheating on her but finds that he was never there to begin with. Chizuru and Ubukata strike an unlikely friendship since their partners are cheating on them with each other. The other prominent guests on board are the Kuruma family, and the entire mystery is centered around them. Sohei Kuruma, the family patriarch, is a rich old man who wants to give all his wealth to his housekeeper. His son and daughter-in-law are against that, but there is nothing they can do about it. The housekeeper’s son makes friends with Ubukata and keeps chiding him for his submissiveness to the guests. This is the entire cast that causes chaos on the ship.
How do Ubukata and Chizuru investigate the murder?
Sohei is killed by his daughter-in-law after he is pushed into the water, and she makes sure that he drowns. When Ubukata, Chizuru, the housekeeper’s son, and four other guests witness the murder, Sohei once again falls back into the water. That is the first clue for the audience that something else has also happened. When Ubukata alerts the ship captain that there has been a murder and they go to the crime scene to check it out, there isn’t anything there, and Ubukata ends up getting a suspension since the rest of the witnesses deny having seen anything. Chizuru’s reason for that is that the boy was traumatized, and the other guests kept silent because they didn’t want to go back to Japan, which would be the case if the murder was discovered.
Sohei’s body has been dragged back in by his family because they don’t want to reveal his death before they change the will in their favor. Therefore, they have to pretend that he is alive for another day or two. In the meantime, Ubukata and Chizuru set out to convince the other witnesses to speak up. One of the couples is related to the mafia. The woman is the daughter of the mafia kingpin, and she is running away with one of her father’s lackeys to marry him. If they go back to Japan, they will be forced to break up. The other couple insults Chizuru for something we quite failed to understand, but that ends up ruling them out as any possible help.
Ubukata and Chizuru are the only ones left for each other, and for now, they decide to look at what their partners are doing. Snooping on their messages tells them what they think of them, and it is as good as a breakup. Chizuru and Ubukata decide to take a picture themselves, and perhaps that is the moment that they realize that they have feelings for each other.
How does Chizuru confess her feelings for Ubukata?
Chizuru and Ubukata do not want to give up on the investigation yet, so they sneak into Kuruma’s room, where they find Sohei’s body under the bed. They are just about to alert the ship officials when the family informs them about the man’s death, successfully manipulating the events. They had been waiting for the new will, and once that came through, there was no reason to hide the man’s death anymore. Meanwhile, Chizuru gets a message from her boyfriend in which he professes his love for her while asking to get back together. That confuses Chizuru, and she wants to go back, but Ubukata says something that makes us realize that this man has a lot more substance than he ever let on. He says that almost loving someone is the same as loving them already, and we wish that this fact was better known by more people. Finally, Chizuru comes to her senses and decides to stay on the ship with Ubukata.
Why does the magician kill Sohei?
The first thing for this new couple to do is to reassess their witnesses. Luck is finally on their side because both the other couples are on the verge of breaking up. In the mafia couple, the girl wants to break up after discovering that her boyfriend is cheating. In the filmmaking couple, the man wants to go back to Japan to audition for an art movie. These two take the video of the murder to Ubukata and Chizuru, and they finally have something to confront the Kuruma couple with.
When the wife denies being involved in the whole business, the husband brings out the video of the murder that he had secretly taken, and that is proof of the crime that was committed. However, Chizuru notices that in both videos, the moon looks different, which leads to the conclusion that they were taken at different times. That is when the husband remembers that his father’s lungs did not have any water in them, which means that his death was not caused by drowning. Also, his hands were burned, and that was a clue they had all ignored till then. But now, the murderer steps forward himself, and he is none other than Edward, the magician on board. He had pulled Sohei out of the water and then proceeded to electrocute him with his wand, as the audience came to know at the end of In Love and Deep Water.
The magician was the husband of the woman from whom Sohei had stolen an organ for his business many years ago. The woman had died, and the man had been seeking revenge since. Sohei had repented his actions, and it was one of the reasons he wanted to give his wealth to the housekeeper. But that did nothing to heal the wounds of the magician, who was only looking for revenge and gladly surrendered once he had that.
During In Love and Deep Water‘s ending, Sohei’s family did not get any of his wealth, and the housekeeper and her son received their due. On the other hand, Ubukata and Chizuru were happily together.
Final Thoughts
In Love and Deep Water struggled with blending the love story with the murder mystery. It was also unnecessarily long with some non-essential subplots, and the actual surprise was for a rather fleeting moment. It is not a bad watch, but it is still not all that it could have been.
