A pleasant cohesion of tones and styles that separately have always been on the fringes of Del Toro's films, and here coalesce exquisitely.

Rating: 8/10 (14 February 2020)

To compare it to a Wes Anderson Hellboy spin-off or a Bryan Fuller Bioshock would do it's myriad of other influences and its quality a disservice. The film is full of tremendously telling and expansive sets, sumptuous music and eye melting colours and idyllic bright sunlight. The script plays in shorthand both to tell it's little stories quickly and to sometimes turn them on their heads. Sally Hawkins is sublime, really genuinely committed and captivating and heartbreaking. The way the main characters use sex seems to illuminate the crass shorthand that other films use to show their sympathetic characters as lonely and their evil characters as sex-starved maniacs. In this film, their personalities and their pasts and their place in the world drive them. All the players in fact are as at the top of their game. The themes and allegory are all very current and although the ending is the weakest part, I'm still eternally grateful that this film exists at this place in time and this place in Del Toro's career; not as impersonal as Blade 2, not as ugly as Cronos, not as trial and error as Hellboy, richer than Pan's Labrynth, meatier than Crimson Peak; Besides Devil's Backbone, The Shape of Water probably represents the best Del Toro has to offer.