Shape over substance and yet some wonderful moments

Rating: 7/10 (7 January 2020)

Del Toro gives great importance both to the design of his creatures and their majesty: the Shape of Water is a wonderful monster of a movie indeed, one of those few movies that manages to create memorable sceneries but still make them coherent with the story and its themes. Not a single moment is wasted, everything is functional, even the silly sequences here and there. Differently from Pan's Labyrinth though, it's the movie's message that feels a bit cliché: it's not too different from tales we've already heard like Frankenstein, and the usage of the Cold War as a setting is little more than a macguffin for the second act of the story. Theoretically, the time period is functional to depict an age where America was constantly afraid of the "other", the stranger, the different one. But Del Toro isn't really telling anything new here. It's just telling it in the most poetic and "fairy tale"-like way possible. And it works