Stills from the movie The Shape of Water
How many directors can show viewers a woman with a fish man who eats cats? I believe this list will not be compared
Gilmo del Toro's name was longer. No one can make a horror film so romantic, and Gilmour's work perfectly balances dreams, nightmares and reality, pulling you into a terrible world and holding your hand tightly to make you feel safe. From those fantasy worlds, he saw our cruel world. To date, Pan's Labyrinth is the best example of his skill, while The Shape of Water is comparable.
The story is set in the early 1960s, which is the era of a film about fear and liberation. The air is filled with cold war delusions, and in an underground secret laboratory, scientists are studying a creature (Doug Jones) captured in South America. It is a human, smooth amphibian with gills, spines and very sharp teeth. A formidable government agent, Richard (Michael Shannon), oversees experiments on the animal, insisting on dismembering it so that the United States can extract all its secrets and outmaneuver the Russians. Described as one of the greatest discoveries in human history, this creature was worshipped as a god in its primitive environment. But now it's being used as a way to give the powerful more power.
It's a film that becomes meaningful as viewers watch it over and over again, and the bland story becomes more thorough as it becomes familiar.
Alyssa (Sally Hawkins) is a lab cleaner and a female revolutionary. The pain of childhood made Alyssa lose her voice, and her silence seemed to make her a trusted listener to those who had no voice in medieval society. Her best friends are a gay illustrator, Giles (Richard Jenkins), and an African-American colleague, Zelda (Octavia Spencer). When Alyssa spotted the creature and saw how horrible it had been treated, she tried to communicate with it and make it feel better. When they get to know each other, they form a bond, a romantic bond.
Gilmour's approach to constructing this highly unlikely romance is clever. Alyssa was as silent as an animal, making their relationship possible. If she can talk, her attempt to talk to it might make it look like a pet. Because they all communicate through action, they are equal in conversation, and they draw closer through sign language, body language, and music. Before the viewer realizes this, it seems perfectly reasonable that a human woman might like a blue-green sea creature.
It's a cute film, but not pretentious, with musical illusions and magic realism, but also violent, bloody and harsh realities. It's not just a fairy tale, it's a very pressing moral, political film, like Pan's Labyrinth, and it's not hard to find modern similarities for greedy leaders who fear equality.
At its core is the remarkable performance of Sally Hawkins, who was born a sympathetic actress, and a calm face that always presented her with a quiet, thoughtful image on the screen, but when playing a woman who lacked the right to speak, her thin body burst out of strength and appeared powerful. Gilmour immediately told us that this was not the original Disney princess, and she indulged in the bathroom with the timer on so she could finish it before breakfast was ready. This woman is very practical, and Sally shows us with every muscle of her expressive face a woman who has no voice but is full of emotion.
When watched for the first time, the film is full of wonderful moments and evil and beautiful pictures. When the movie is over, when you think about it in the weeks after it ends, the deeper meaning of the movie surfaces. If you want to describe this movie, it may sound very strange and a little creepy, like a very niche fetish sound film with a limited budget. The film is magical, all the feelings are fantastic, and the biggest risk of Guillermo del Toro's career, and there's nothing more worth it than that.