Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water is clearly inspired by 1954's Creature from the Black Lagoon. del Toro, a director known for making films that walk the line between the real and the fantastic, also appears to borrow from the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Jeunet's films--in particular The City of Lost Children and Delicatessen--are both whimsical and a little scary and bizarre. They're like the original Grimm's fairytales, filled with evil men and strange creatures, violence and playfulness.
Despite pulling from the work of other directors, classic horror and science-fiction, and millennia of fables and fairytales, The Shape of Water is anything but derivative. del Toro has done something remarkable with this film: he's taken half a dozen different genres--suspense, romance, drama, fantasy, history, and horror (with a sprinkling of comedy)--and stitched them together in such a way where no one genre dominates another. And at the heart of this tale is a desire common to all humans (and, apparently, non-humans as well): the longing for connection and the desire to be seen and accepted as we are.
del Toro also accomplishes a difficult feat: he makes us believe that a woman might actually want to fuck an amphibious half-man, half-creature. And fuck they do. Hoo boy.
Taking place in 1960, The Shape of Water follows Elisa Esposito (in a career-best performance by Sally Hawkins), a mute cleaning woman who works the graveyard shift at a government research facility in Baltimore. Elisa's only friends are her closeted gay neighbor, Giles (Richard Jenkins), and fellow cleaning lady Zelda (Octavia Spencer). Elisa seems to lead a quiet, orderly, and lonely life.
Then one day, the research facility becomes home to an "asset"--a sea creature that was captured and brought to Baltimore by Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon, malevolent and somewhat sexy as he always is). Strickland and his superior, General Hoyt, see this creature as a potential weapon in the Cold War and want to vivisect it to see how it works. Scientist Bob Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlberg) sees the creature as "beautiful" and wants to treat it with gentleness and certainly not kill it. Meanwhile, Elisa sneaks into the lab where the creature is kept chained up and feeds it hardboiled eggs and teaches it sign language. She discovers that the creature can communicate and feel emotions. When she overhears the plans to vivisect her new friend, she decides to bust the creature out of the facility and set it free.
There's also a Russian double-agent subplot as well as a subplot involving Giles in his attempts to express his desire for other men. del Toro manages to make these plot lines vital to the story and its themes of what it means to be an outsider and to be misunderstood. In fact, every character in The Shape of Water is misunderstood in some way, and forced into submission by other people, by society, or by circumstances. Of course, Elisa is misunderstood in a literal sense by being mute. Giles is a gay man in the 1960s, Zelda is a black woman, and the creature is, well, not human. But even Richard Strickland--the "bad guy" of the film--is misunderstood and bullied by his superiors. He reacts by acting aggressively towards those weaker than himself, but his pain is understandable even if his actions are deplorable. Like most great films, The Shape of Water has no one-dimensional characters and no simple answers.
Director of Photography Dan Lauston films The Shape of Water with a wonderful palette of shades of green, from the bright green candy that Strickland compulsively consumes to the grayish-blue green of the water where the creature lives. Green is a symbol of renewal and nature. Likewise, eggs show up in the movie a lot: Elisa hard boils them everyday before she heads to work, and her first connection with the creature is when she offers it an egg to eat. Like the color green, eggs are also symbols of rebirth and fertility, and The Shape of Water--especially the ending--is the story of Elisa's rebirth in the face of finding a connection and love where she leasts expects it.
If you think that a movie about a human woman falling in love with a non-human creature is silly or stupid, of course I only have to point to King Kong, or Beauty and the Beast, or every vampire and werewolf story ever told. Stories like these are about being loved for who we are, no matter our outside packaging. Stories about monsters are also about being hated or feared by society and a demand for conformity.
The Shape of Water takes place during a precarious time in United States history. The early 1960s was a time of manners and hierarchies, but it was also right before the world blew wide open with JFK's assassination, the Civil Rights Act, and Woodstock. The Shape of Water reveals that during this time in the United States, beautiful strangeness--or maybe a more accurate term would be "queerness"--existed right there under everyone's nose. That queerness, like the creature in the movie, lurked below the surface, just waiting for its moment to emerge from the depths and demand to be seen in all its glory.
Grade: B+
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