An unconventional beauty.

Rating: 9/10 (15 April 2018)

Among my favorite directors is Guillermo del Toro. The guy has one of the most unique artistic and cinematic visions in the world of film. His inspiration to become a filmmaker was "Creature from the Black Lagoon" of all things. Del Toro's love the Gill Man translated to his passion for monsters, though he felt sad that the famed amphibian never got a happy ending. Initially, he was brought in by Universal to remake it, but that deal went south, so he decided to more-or-less tell his own version of the story, adding a new spin that surprisingly won over both audiences and awards. That, folks, is "The Shape of Water", a movie I've wanted to see since its inception.
Plot: In this variation of beauty and the beast, a mute janitor named Eliza (Sally Hawkins), who works in a government facility, meets the Asset (Doug Jones), a fish-like humanoid from South America, and the two form an unconventional relationship. With the Asset under threat of death and subsequent vivisection by the unstable Col. Strickland (Michael Shannon), Eliza will go to great lengths to ensure the creature's survival and happiness, but will she succeed in a world so unwilling to accept that which is different?
This is, indeed, a masterpiece. The Asset is an amazing character with a stellar design and a performance that feels believable (animal yet human-like). Props to Jones and the effects team for making the suit and facial expressions work with flying colors. Sally Hawkins gets high marks from her own performance, a mix of sign language and heartstring-pulling facial expressions. The pair work well together as much as their characters. The rest of the cast did very well too from Shannon's execution of a threatening villain who feels unfulfilled (a product of the era) to Octavia Spencer's humorous inflections to sympathetic portrayals by Richard Jenkins and Michael Stuhlbarg.
There is also much needed credit to the world itself. It replicates the time of which the story is set in very well with many great uses of color, music, and an assortment of objects that are relics by today's standards. The best part of it all is that a majority is physically built with not much in the way of CGI save for backgrounds and a few other aesthetics. Color is also used to convey mood or symbolize a character's status (physical or emotional) and water, as the title implies, is very prominent and more or less serves both a physical and symbolic purpose as well. What little lore that exists in this world intrigues me to no end with many open-ended questions, especially in regards to the fish man. As the film is set in the 1960s, themes of racism/sexism, Cold War tensions, minor religious references, and the classic question of what separates man from monster are explored, all done with superb execution in this case. Heck, the Asset is ideal in that he can represent just about any group that suffers unjust oppression.
Fair warning that, unlike Disney's "Beauty and the Beast", this is not for children. There is a little blood + gore, language, and sex/nudity (especially one controversial scene involving the latter in a bathroom).
All in all, "The Shape of Water" is, like the abnormal pair, a thing of beauty, one that I imagine will be marveled for generations to come.