Guillermo del Toro delivers another dazzling fantasy, this time with a powerful heart

Rating: 9/10 (7 August 2018)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is a mute woman, only able to communicate through sign language. The only person who really understands her is her friend Zelda (Octavia Spencer), who works with her as a cleaner at a top secret research facility, where experiments are being carried out on the otherworldly Amphibian Man (Doug Jones.) Elisa comes to form a bond with this beautiful creature and becomes involved in a plot to break him free, setting her on a path with Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), a ruthless senior employee at the place she works.
Guillermo del Toro returns out of nowhere, writing and directing this whimsical little slice of fantasy that further showcases his talents as a filmmaker. After becoming known for action adventure fantasies, such as the Hellboy films and Pan's Labyrinth, here he delivers something with more of a beating emotional heart at its core, that seems to have an equalities agenda beating at its heart, with a lead character who uses sign language, living with a closet homosexual, and being best friends with a woman of colour, at a time when this group in society were stuck in menial, dead end jobs they had little hope of getting out of, whilst straight white men really ruled the world.
In spite of the typically incredible special effects job done on the Amphibian Man, which don't forget to give him the sweetest, most endearing facial features, its the performances that drive the film, and in the lead role, Hawkins is perfectly cast evoking the right amount of empathy, vulnerability and compassion from this character, making her at times feel even more alien than the creature. By contrast, Shannon, although playing to type, is no less cold and scary as the unfeeling authoritarian determined to keep everything in his twisted version of order.

If you can overlook the blatant political correctness, a tiresome and not entirely necessary subplot involving Russian espionage, and the ambiguous but no doubt unwholesome definition of what a woman having sex with some alien thing could be called (beasteality?!?), then this is a stirring and sensational piece of work that, as well as being a dazzling visual experience, perfectly challenges the social attitudes and prejudices of its early 1960s setting. ****