A beautiful adult fairy tale by the brilliant director of "Pan's Labyrinth"

Rating: 10/10 (20 March 2018)

Guillermo del Toro is today's master of fantasy, having been a childhood lover of monsters growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico, before making some of the finest films of recent years -- from the ghostly horror of "The Devil's Backbone" in 2001 to his gothic horror/romance, "Crimson Peak" in 2015. Indubitably, however, his greatest film is "Pan's Labyrinth", the 2006 film many of us consider the finest fantasy film ever made. Now he's broken new ground with "The Shape of Water", one of 2017's most beautiful films.
Set in Baltimore in the year 1962 at the height of the Cold War, the plot follows a mute janitor at a secret government laboratory who forms a bond with a captured amphibian of the "Creature of the Black Lagoon" variety. Her name is Elisa, and Sally Hawkins plays her with an artistry that seems to reach back to the silent days of Chaplin and Keaton. Michael Shannon, with devoted viciousness, plays the right-wing Colonel Strickland, someone more interested in dissecting the creature for exploitation purposes than he is concerned over the space race with the Soviets. There are also elements of religious allegory ("We're created in the Lord's image. You don't think that's what the Lord looks like, do you?").
Del Toro saw "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" on TV at 7 years old and it changed his life. Wishing a different ending for it in which the Gill Man and co-star Julie Adams would consummate their romance and live 'happily ever after', he wrote various scripts of a remake through the years that Universal studio executives wound up rejecting. "The Shape of Water" is the result of del Toro's dream, and now today, with more permissive filmmaking allowable, he's able to deal with the previously verboten issue between fish and human. The resulting film is a worthy accomplishment not only for its production design (embodying various shades of green) and its special effects, but also for attaining the level of a genuine adult fairy tale that deals with issues of trust, tolerance, and love in the human condition -- but most of all what it's like to be an outsider (whether a lonely mute woman, gay man, overweight black woman, or an amphibious sea creature). "This is a healing movie for me," del Toro states; one likes to think it would be for viewers as well.