The Shape of Water

Director Guillermo Del Toro famously has two houses in Los Angeles. One he lives in with his wife and children, and the other, which is actually two adjoining structures, houses his massive collections of books, films, toys, movie posters, scientific specimens, and props from some of his own movies like Pacific Rim and Pan’s Labyrinth as well as from many classic horror and sci fi movies. He calls this second home Bleak House, and it is a physical representation of all his obsessions – classical Hollywood, 1950s gee-whiz science fiction, fairy tales, and horror movies of every stripe.

Del Toro’s films are like Bleak House in that they too are giant collections of all the things he loves. He has made a career of making movies are that unmistakably his, even when it comes to adaptations of other people’s existing material like the Hellboy films. Del Toro’s eye for detail and meticulous attention to every color, texture, and design choice is exacting to the point of almost being fussy. He’s an extremely idiosyncratic filmmaker and his work is both fascinating and entertaining. He won critical and commercial acclaim with 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth, and while most of his other films have been reasonably successful, they were primarily niche pictures. So it was exciting when his latest project, The Shape of Water, earned the most Oscar nominations of any film this year with 13 nods. 

 The film is a remarkable mishmash of The Twilight Zone, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Rogers and Astaire, Shirley Temple, and Amelie. It’s a lot to pack into one film, but Del Toro is nothing if not ambitious and visionary.

Sally Hawkins plays Elisa, a mute woman who works as a custodian at a secret government facility in Cold War-era Baltimore. She lives her very routine life, sharing it only with her next door neighbor, a closeted, aging artist played impeccably by Richard Jenkins and her co-worker at the facility, played by Octavia Spencer who basically just does a variation of her character from The Help.  One day, government workers bring a new project to Elisa’s workplace: a fish man dragged from a lagoon in South America. Humanoid but with gills, webbed hands, feet, and arms, and no ability to speak, he’s kept chained in a pool while scientists, soldiers, and an extraordinarily off-putting government agent played by Michael Shannon decide what to do with him.

Between her custodial duties, Elisa falls in love with the fish man. At first it seems to be mere fascination with his exoticism and difference, but pretty quickly things turn romantic. As viewers, we’re meant to see that both Elisa and the creature are, pardon the pun, fish out of water – oddities that others can’t seem to communicate with but who find in each other a kindred spirit.

When the government decides that vivisection is the best option to get information about the creature, Elisa and her friends stage a daring escape and she houses him in the tub in her apartment until the canals of Baltimore fill with enough water to get him safely out to sea.

The film is beautifully shot and intelligently written and acted, but frankly, as much as I love Del 

Toro and his mishmash Bleak House films, I had a hard time getting behind The Shape of Water. Everything seemed a little too literal and real world for the allegory to function. In the end, the love scenes between Elisa and the fish man that are meant to be dreamy, romantic, and fantastic are just a little…squicky. For me, the film falls just short of transcending into a moving story about acceptance and finding your fellow weirdos in life and unfortunately just stays a movie about a woman and a fish guy getting it on. Your enjoyment will depend on your tolerance for this particularly pure distillation of Del Toro’s Bleak House obsessions.