A "What if?" Romance worth exploring.

Rating: 7/10 (1 July 2018)

Watched "The Shape of Water". It's an outstanding movie. It's about sad and lonely people, drifting through their daily routines, which ends up becoming a sci-fI/ B-movie horror romance about overcoming fears and risking it all in the name of your friends and those that you love. I really wanted to see this in the theater, especially since I knew it would be a great movie once I saw the trailer. I actually listened to the soundtrack a month ago before seeing the film. The songs are like that heard from a carnival merry-go-round, with a hint of tango. I'm glad it won best picture. The muted greens and blacks and wets, the boiling water, the tub. Reflections of illuminated water, the sound of silence from sign language. Even the camera lights, and even the jello. All together, feeling like a swim in the deepest murkiest waters lit only by the moonlight from above.
I don't want to remember the historic portrayal of the movie, the attention to detail, or the cold war, blue collar vs. white collar, segregation, racism, homophobia. These elements are intricately layered into the story line, in all good ways. Instead, I want to remember Elisa and the amphibian man, alone, with no one else.
If you ever saw Hellboy II, there's a character named Abe that's so similar to this film's amphibian man. The feelings that Abe has for the elf princess Nuala are similarly captured in the same murkiness, but the only gesture of expression between the two is a track from Barry Manilow entitled "I Can't Smile Without You". If you ever felt like Abe and Nuala's story needed to end differently, then "The Shape of Water" at least gives you what you yearned for. ;)