A Masterpiece.

Rating: 10/10 (31 January 2018)

The Shape of Water: A Horror Film but also SF Adventure, Spy Thriller, Love Story, directed, produced and co-written (with Vanessa Taylor) by Guillermo del Toro. Beautifully filmed by cinematographer by Dan Laustin in so many shades of green, teal, aquamarine, tans, brown, gold and red which give it a 50s/early 60s feel. Wonderful production design by Paul D Austerby with a subterranean laboratory and over cinema apartments in which most of the action transpires.
Mute janitor Elisa (Sally Hawkins) and her friend Zelda (Octavia Spencer) work in a military run research facility when a strange Creature (Doug Jones) is brought to the laboratory. The Creature injures Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon) who was torturing it. Strickland captured the Creature in the Amazon and hopes to exploit its amphibious nature to advance the US Space Programme. Falling in love with the creature, Elisa enlists the help of Zelda, her neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins) and a kindly scientist, Dr Bob (Michael Stuhlbarg) to free him from the laboratory.
The Creature resembles the 1950s Creature From The Black Lagoon with aspect of Predator and ALF. Jones brings the creature to life and you can truly believe in the love which develops between them. Inter-species sex results which strangely doesn't strain credibility due ti the acting skills of Hawkins and Jones but will no doubt outrage some. Its not so long ago since director Tim Burton in Planet Of The Apes avoided a romance between Astronaut (Wahlberg) and Chimpanzee (Bonham Carter) as he feared that such a film would be shunned by cinema chains.
This is also a film about loneliness, that of Elisa, Giles who is gay, Bob a stranger in a strange land, Zelda who is estranged within her marriage and of course the Creature himself. The Civil Rights struggle takes place in the background as the film is set in 1962 Baltimore. Sometimes it comes to the fore as when the man Giles longs after refuses service to a Black couple in a café. Also, all of the janitors/attendants at the research facility are Black or Hispanic but the scientists/technicians and military police are White.
All of this is expertly juggled and mixed together by del Toro to make a masterpiece. 10/10.