Films > Film Reviews

The Shape Of Water

Cinema City

10/02/18

Guillermo del Toro’s latest (ad)venture has made quite a splash this year and for entirely deserved reasons. We follow the love story between Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins), a mute janitor working in a secret government laboratory, and the man-fish discovery brought there for scientific experimentation.

A dark fairy tale for an adult audience, The Shape of Water, at its heart, is a story of good and evil, fear of the unknown, forbidden love and self-discovery, reminding us in the most haunting way possible why we fell in love with myths and legends in the first place.

By far the most ambitious del Toro instalment to date, The Shape of Water is a triumph of magic realism and a rather refreshing counter-measure to the indulgent high-fantasy franchises that have dominated the movie industry in recent decades. Despite being the most stripped back and least monstrous of all del Toro’s visions, it the most effective by a mile as there being only one aspect of fantasy, in the form of an amphibious humanoid, allows you to suspend the bejesus out of your disbelief and stops the film from sliding head-first into the absurd.

It’s impossible not to fall in love with Elisa’s character who, with her endless tenderness and fierce devotion for those she loves, will quietly and effortlessly steal your heart. Hawkins (Happy Go Lucky) is a sensation to watch and delivers a masterclass in physical acting. The desperation and conflict that she conjures from the minutest of expressions or subtlest of mannerisms proves without doubt that this was the role she was born to play.

Michael Shannon (Nocturnal Animals) delivers some genuine shivers-down-your-spine moments as the sadistic head of security Colonel Richard Strickland. More than just your run-of-the-mill villain, his love for silencing women and deranged obsession with becoming the archetypal American man no matter the cost, transcends him beyond the role ‘bad guy’ and turns him into everything wrong with America, with its hatred of anything that doesn’t conform, from mute janitors to gay advertisement artists to scaled sentient beings from the Amazon river.

At times, almost sickening in the way it flaunts its teal colour-scheme, from bath matts to Cadillacs, The Shape of Water’s aesthetic, so beautifully marries with its watery theme, that the artistic décor will inevitably make you go green at the gills with jealousy. The score is the perfect blend of creepy, whimsical and haunting and delivers just the right kind of supernatural unease to cause Danny Elfman great arousal.

Drenched in style, from opening sequence where we travel the submerged corridors of Elisa’s flat, watching objects and furniture, as well as our dear protagonist, suspended in eerie green waters, to her neighbour Giles’ love of tap-dancing and musicals, this is a film that is very much its own thing, thank you very much. Although it introduces motifs that by all accounts should be nauseatingly familiar, such as the black-hatted Cold War secret agents skulking in the rain and all the subterfuge and skulduggery that surrounded the Space Race, del Toro takes to a world we thought we knew, performs his cinematic CPR upon it, and renders it spellbindingly fresh. It is an epic voyage into a world we both know very well and yet still know nothing about, it is a classic fantasy adventure and yet also a dark satire of international politics and it is just as nostalgic of an era gone by as it is critical of its intolerance and toxic ideologies. In short, The Shape of Water is that perfect pick ‘n’ mix of cinematic ingredients that most directors and writers would give their right hand (and most likely other appendages too) just to say they had a part in making it.

The Shape of Water will drown you with its breath-taking beauty and submerge you in its extraordinary vision. It is a self-contained universe created just for you to breathe and swim and completely lose yourself within for two glorious hours.

9/10