Guillermo Del Toro's auteurism lies in his use of monsters in film. They illustrate what's on the outside doesn't reflect what's underneath while underpinning that real monsters often inhabit a form much closer to human. The Shape of Water uses a variant of the Creature from the Black Lagoon to tackle love, both it's physical and emotional components between people or, umm...things. Maybe it's better for us to say love between all creatures, but then that teeters on bestiality.
And that's the line you have to draw to keep Del Toro's sweet metaphor from slipping into a sinister mind-fuck. It's sweet at base level, but can turn disgusting when you break it down to the nitty gritty, technical, sexual details.
'I thought it was going to be a friendship kind of love story,' a female friend said to me after we finished watching the movie in one of those fancy, recliner lounge theaters.
'What did you expect? That's Guillermo Del Toro,' my male friend replied.
'I don't know. I didn't think she was actually going to have sex with the thing.'
WARNING: This post contains spoilers.
The story itself is beautiful. Mute janitor, Elissa, is all alone in this immaculately designed 1960s world save for her gay-artist neighbor and her minority co-worker, the amazing Octavia Spencer. The film shows how the treatment of the Creature mirrors Americas treatment of African Americans, homosexuals, the disenfranchised and the disabled in the post World War II era.
As opposed to the move Bright, which I reviewed earlier this week, this movie properly uses, non-humans as stand-ins for communities. It shows indecencies committed against both and ties them to together to show how they are wrong as opposed to haphazardly slapping cultural stereotypes onto monsters. Whenever a character throws around a 'you people' or 'your kind' at one of Elisa's friends, it feels like when Michael Shannon, who plays Richard Strickland, the head of security antagonist, electrocutes the creature with his cattle prod.
Strickland, a conservative view of justice and authority charged with religious conviction offers a perfect foil for our Creature who, while uncivilized and less capable by standard human metrics, represents a pure love not warped by millennia of institutional and societal constructs. As Elisa tells her artist neighbor through sign language 'when he looks at me he does not see what I am lacking. All he knows that he is happy to see me. Every time.'
Strickland also fancies Elisa, but that's because he fetishizes her silence, imagining it as unbridled submission to the dominance he craves. The one truly laugh out loud scene is when Elisa signs 'F-U-C-K-Y-O-U' to Strickland after condescending interrogation of Eliza and Zelda where he says 'I don't know why I'm questioning the help, the piss-cleaners. The film also teeters toward silliness when a dream sequence of Elisa singing and dancing with the creature appears mid-dinner, but it feels like the editor realized this and kept the scene as brief as possible once Del Toro (hypothetically) refused to have it taken out.
The plot is procedural, (monster comes to town / falls in love with woman / creature to be killed / woman breaks out monster / they try to find the monster / she frees the monster), yet every beat is hit perfectly. Del Toro spares us the 10 minute chase scene near the climax, opting instead to proficiently hit the large beats (Zelda's husband's betrayal / Zelda warning Eliza / Strickland finding the note / Strickland shooting them and the Creatures resurrection which leads to Strickland's famous last words, 'you are a god.' These words pair nicely with an earlier scene where he told Elisa and Zelda that the Creature was not a god and that god looked human, like them, but 'probably a little more like me than you,' as a dig on the white messiah complex many males carry.
The film has great set pieces, from Strickland's longing for a Cadillac, to the salesman's smooth intro on the rotating display which turns into a hard sell as soon as Strickland sits in the teal Cadillac he ends up buying and having wrecked during the Creature's escape sequence. It perfectly captures middle class America's essence, and the exploitative, bait and switch performed on it by capitalism. While one could argue this movie leans left with it's digs on capitalism and a sympathetic undercover Russian scientist-spy who helps our protagonists break out the Creature, we argue the movie leans toward love and life, as the Russian defects from his own country's orders when they command he be killed before the US can dissect him opting instead to keep him alive.
In addition to the performances mentioned earlier, Sallie Hawkins (Elisa), conveys emotion using only her face well. It's as if her face has so much energy because of her inability to speak words that she might burst open with light at any moment. This movie is worthy of two hours and four minutes of your time and should fare well during awards season, nominations-wise at least.
Shots of water, abound and work well as a thematic element in the grammar of shots of this movie. From eggs in boiling water, to rain, to mopping pools to bath tub masturbation, every shot with water is packed with meaning. One can almost picture yelling 'More water!' as his mantra and main direction while shooting all these scenes. The most beautiful yet also the most unrealistic of these is when Elisa plugs up her bathroom with towels so the entire room can fill with water and her and the Creature have more room to copulate and undulate in water. It leaks into the theater below and partially bursts through the door frame. In reality I feel water would not have escaped that way in real life, maybe it was speaking to the shape of water. Although not all maybe be able or want to, I'm willing to suspend disbelief for love, which is Del Toro's big ask throughout the entire film.
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