above all it is a film about feelings

Rating: 9/10 (6 January 2018)

By subverting and paying homage to all sorts of styles and genres, Del Toro creates his own style and his own genre in The Shape of Water, a film that will hopefully live on for generations and be considered a masterful classic by future filmgoers. Many people will hate it (there are already plenty of reviews on this very site that are unreasonably negative, which is always bound to happen when someone creates a work of art that is genuinely beautiful and creative and is also willing to take people out of their comfort zones and be totally weird and have serious moral questions and thought provoking statements to make), but many people will, and should, love it until the end of time. It is a moving, touching, thrilling, frightening, funny, and romantic hybrid of the whimsical fairy tale, the classic Universal monster flick, the Old Hollywood melodrama, the surrealist film, the fantastically foreign art house masterpiece, and probably tons of other things to. The characters are well developed, Del Toro's lens has a profound understanding of human emotion that makes me want to cry as I reflect upon this simply flat out majorly f*cking brilliant movie...that's enough of my talking, just see it!