'If we do nothing, neither are we.'

Rating: 10/10 (18 March 2018)

Another Guillermo del Toro masterpiece - story, screenplay (with Vanessa Taylor) and directed by - (Pan's Labyrinth, Pacific Rim, The Hobbit, Hellboy, Cronos, etc) deserves the Oscar he won for this fine and daring film. How this man is able to take imagination and make it so plausible is a gift - and one we can only hop he continues to share.
THE SHAPE OF WATER, an otherworldly fable set against the backdrop of Cold War era America circa 1962 opens windows on racial prejudice as played in that period, the constant threat or thought that everything evil must originate in Russia, the demeaning role of women, people with special disabilities and how they cope with them, and the cruelty of secret service police, tec. In the hidden high-security government laboratory where she works, lonely mute Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is trapped in a life of isolation, living with the artist Giles (Richard Jenkins). Elisa's life is changed forever when she and co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) discover a secret classified experiment - an 'alien' amphibian man (Doug Jones) whose ability to be both water born and land born introduces fears of higher intelligence that must be a Russian plot. The cruel officer Michael Shannon Shannon), is assigned to destroy amphibian just as Dr. Robert Hofstetter (Michael Stuhlberg) is determined to protect him from the Russian underground. In the scurry of the secrecy Elisa befriends Amphibian Man and a curious and tender relationship is created between a mute woman and a creature unable to speak.
Odd references to old movies as shared by Giles and Elisa grow into a dramatic ending. Sally Hawkins is extraordinary as is the entire cast. Alexandre Desplat's musical score