A Beautiful Romantic Fantasy that could've gone Terribly.

Rating: 8/10 (20 February 2018)

Imagine Creature from the Black Lagoon as a Romance. Elisa is a mute cleaner at a government facility who becomes enchanted by the latest addition to the facility's roster; an Amphibian Man caught in South America and hauled all the way up to America by a government agent called Strickland, who seeks to exploit the creature to get one up on the Russians in the height of the Cold War. As the movie goes on, Elisa and her friends break the Amphibian Man out to save it from certain death, and an oddball romance blossoms between the two. Yes, it's a concept that sounds completely terrible on paper, and yet Del Toro manages to craft a beautiful and moving film out of it.
Being a Del Toro movie, The Shape of Water is not safe by any means (I mean, the entire concept of a woman falling in love with a sea creature is a pretty big hint). One of the opening montages shows Elisa in full-frontal nudity pleasuring herself in the bath, showing that the movie is not afraid of the sexual connotations, and is in fact willing to embrace them, without being titilising. Similarly, it's not afraid to show the more graphic and gorier aspects of bringing a sea creature home to a house full of cats. While it is maybe a little tame compared to Del Toro's previous works, it still feels fundamentally like the only thing Del Toro could craft. He manages to include the more graphic and risky moments that makes the film feel real, without losing it's fairytale, fantasy leanings. The sexuality doesn't undercut the romance, and the gore doesn't undercut the beauty or the film's themes.
On the note of themes, The Shape of Water is rife with them. It's a story about misfits and the loneliness they endure because of it. Elisa is mute which makes her easy to ostracise. She struggles without meaningful companionship, and on the entire cleaning staff only has one friend; Zelda. Zelda is a fairly normal person beyond her skin colour. Being black in the early 60s wasn't an especially kind time, and neither is being a woman, and she suffers both racism and sexism daily. Elisa's other friend is her neighbour Giles, who is not only an old man watching his youth fade away, concealing it with tupées, but is also gay in a time when it's not acceptable, and suffers similar rejections to companionship that Elisa does. The Amphibian Man goes without saying.
Another theme is that of masks, or hiding who you truly are. Strickland, on the outside, is a successful family man complete with two kids, nice house, cadillac, smart suits, and a wife who beckons to him, but on the inside he's racist, sexist, fetishes the silence of women (both literally and figuratively), and the threat of losing gradually tears him apart. Doctor Hoffstetler, the main scientist on the project is a covert Russian spy tasked with ensuring the Americans don't gleam more from the Amphibian Man than them. Yet his deception is twofold, as he doesn't even work unquestioningly for the Russians. He has too much of a scientific curiousity of the Amphibian Man, caring for it in his own way, and ultimately helping Elisa to break him free. Then of course there's Giles masking his age with a tupée. Elisa's mask is much more subtle, and unknown even to her.
Each character is played with depth and nuance by each cast member, and there's absolutely no weak links. Michael Shannon does what he does best as the menacing antagonist who's slowly falling apart himself. A quintessentially masculine man who ultimately can't keep up the charade. Michaul Stuhlbarg plays Hoffstetler with an empathy that makes his character much softer than I imagine he would have appeared on the page. Octavia Spencer, like Shannon, does what she does best as a middle-aged, working class black woman brought down by her homelife and her environment. Richard Jenkins is pretty killer as Giles, tapping into his sensitive side with such finesse that what could otherwise have felt like a pretty cliché gay character instead is filled with depth and charm.
Of course the real power house is Sally Hawkins who is as fantastic as always as Elisa. Without saying a word, she manages to convey such an emotional depth that will make her the envy of her colleagues. One scene in particular has her appealing to Giles affection for her, to get him to help her break the Amphibian Man out. It's one of those scenes that would be a career-defining monologue in any other movie, but of course in Shape of Water it is done without dialogue, and instead conveyed almost entirely in sign language and body language, and Sally Hawkins kills it. The fluency and conviction with which she performs is captivating to watch, and it's hard not to get invested in Elisa's plight.
On a more technical standpoint The Shape of Water doesn't fail to deliver either, at least not for the most part. The general aesthetic of the movie is like that of the 50s and 60s, but painted in such a way that gives it an oddly fantastical edge. I've seen it compared to the video game Bioshock, which feels like an accurate comparison. There are a number of shots that feel like paintings. However what makes each shot look so good and enthralling is the sharp lighting with harsh brights and shadows, which can make the film feel a little dark (but then again, it's Del Toro, and it still looks great). The score by Alexandre Desplat is also really good, with a memorable theme.
But on the note of music strikes my only real complaint with the movie. There's one scene that should've been a hugely powerful glimpse into Elisa's desires, but it decides to portray this by shifting to black and white and giving us a musical number. Maybe I'm biased because I hate musicals (at least ones that aren't family films), but I never find random musical numbers in otherwise fairly serious movies ever work, and The Shape of Water is no exception. It's jarring, doesn't feel particularly well done (especially compared to the rest of the movie), and the emotions it wants to portray could've been done much better another way. It's a bold move, and thematically fits, so for that I give Del Toro kudos, but it just felt a little tacked-on and unnecessary, breaking the movie's pace for a brief extravagance.
The Shape of Water is ultimately a very beautiful movie though, there's no denying that. It toes the line of something that could've gone terribly wrong, but somehow Del Toro has managed to give us a romantic fantasy for the ages. I give it a high 8/10.