The Shape Of Water - This Week At The Movies

Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

Baltimore, 1962. Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is a mute woman who works as a cleaning lady in a hush-hush high-security government laboratory. Called in to deal with an “incident” with her work pal Zelda (Octavia Spencer), she discovers the lab's classified secret: a mysterious, fish-like creature from South America that lives in a water tank. As Elisa develops a unique bond with the alien-like being, she realises she will have to do something drastic to protect her new friend from what the authorities have planned for him.

Pros:

• Writer-director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, Crimson Peak) paints his modern fairy tale with an expert’s hand, with every frame rich in colour, symbolism and… love. You feel his passion everywhere, for the movies that inspired this one – Creature from the Black Lagoon being the most obvious influence – for the characters he’s created, for the look of every single thing. This is a thought-out, designed, meticulous, colour-coded film that looks like a moving painting. It’s art, basically. Deal with it.
• Sally Hawkins – who Guillermo del Toro wrote the film for, by the way – is great, as ever. Despite the lack of lines to learn, she does so much good work here, there is so much to enjoy. There’s a lot of nuance in her performance, bringing us a woman who finds a way of expressing herself, of loving someone, with another being who is also unable to speak: Doug Jones’ fishman, known as ‘The Asset’. A del Toro veteran – he played the similarly looking Abe Sapien in the Hellboy films – Jones is also superb, conveying so much through a heavy slap of prosthetics. A tip of the 1960s fedora, too, to the Oscar-nominated Richard Jenkins as Elisa’s in-the-closet next-door neighbour, the ever-brilliant Octavia Spencer and the skilfully menacing Michael Shannon as a deranged government super wonk.
• This movie is about outsiders. It’s about a mute cleaning lady falling in love with a fishman. It’s weird, different, odd... beautiful. And that should be celebrated in a sea – pun intended – of sameiness we so often swim in.

Cons:

• While I admire The Shape Of Water (and have a lot of good things to say about it, see above), I must confess I didn’t properly connect with it emotionally. It felt a little too artificial for my taste, like a very well-produced West End musical production, all velvet curtains, costumes and “art”. While I have read what feels like hundreds of reviews singing this film’s praises – see also: 13 Oscar nominations – I truly wish I cared more for the characters, and invested more into their decisions and actions, no matter how well-acted the performances were. It’s just too mannered for me, and while I actively enjoy that in, say, Wes Anderson’s films, I didn’t here. “I cried”, some say. I did not.
• The overhype train hit me square in the kisser for this one, with all the “Oscar buzz” and general “You gotta watch it!” unpicking some of the potential pleasure I might have had. It’s very good. Great, even, in its own way. I just don’t LOOOOOVE it.
• I don’t like fish. There, I said it.

Three word review: Beautiful, admirable art.