A MUST WATCH !!

Rating: 9/10 (27 October 2019)

Director Guillermo Del Toro is a magical creator who is capable of conjuring up unique, mystical and quite magnificent settings for his narratives and has set this story in Baltimore of early 1960s.
It is a tender and captivating romance between a mute janitor Elisa (Sally Hawkins) working in a top secret research facility and a creature captured from Amazon which is part fish and part human and is believed to be a river god by local populace. The government seeks to experiment on this mysterious creature for space research and sees it merely as an asset which is dispensable. But, the mute janitor sees it as more of a fellow being - a companion who is capable of communication as well as feelings of compassion, empathy and love.
Del Toro weaves a fantastic tale around this romance in the cold war era which is largely made possible and believable by an Oscar worthy performance from an excellent Sally Hawkins who is ably supported by Octavia Spencer, Richard Jenkins, Michael Stuhlberg as well as Michael Shannon. Great music by Alexandre Desplat and vivid visuals from Dan Laustsen add further allure to this moving fable.
That a story could be so simple, surreal, yet layered in so many subtle shades and suffused with such a gentle and generous spirit all through is an extraordinary achievement of this ace auteur for, in less trained hands, it could have so easily become a caricature or worse.