Film Review – The Shape of Water – 9 out of 10

Staring Sally Hawkins (an unknown actress for me), Michael Shannon and Octavia Spencer, this film has the incredible power of transporting us from the theater chair to a top-secret research facility in the 1960s, where we follow two unlikely heroes: two female janitors…

Yes, they clean secret stuff at a top-secret facility: Elisa Esposito, portrayed by Sally Hawkins, who’s nominated for best lead actress; and Zelda Fuller, portrayed by Octavia Spencer. They are long-time friends and they have radical different personal lifes, but somehow, they are incredibly similar: one is lonely, the other is married, but, in their own ways, they are both lonely… What shouldn’t impress anyone, since this is also a movie about loneliness…

I absolutely loved this film. Contrary to a lot of other films, it’s not based on true events or characters, rather Guillermo del Toro does his magic and creates a whole Universe, making us believe that it exists. And how does he make it? Well, like it always should be, movies are all about… Story, story, story! Nowadays, it seems that screenwriters had forgotten how to create a good story, with complete characters, logic Universes and the need to make the viewer engaged with it. Guillermo del Toro, side by side on this with Tarantino, is one of the few magicians still out there… The story of the film is particularly simple, in the sense that it can be resumed in one sentence (which I’m not going to do, or I would spoil you…), but it is incredible complex at the same time: a lot of characters, full of fears, doubts, but also willing to make a change; a lot of themes come up through dialogue, like machismo, racism, philosophy, politics, power; a great diversity of relationships between characters; and a good central plot, completed and interchanged with smaller plots that make this story particularly rich.

Guillermo del Toro made an amazing job with this film – much better than his previous one (Crimson Peak) –, leaving his typical mark: there’s always monsters, there’s always blood, there’s always a somehow-Tarantino-approach to filming, and there’s always a good, good story. We’re introduced to a peculiar story at the beginning, where we begin to follow a mute janitor who lives alone and only has two friends in her life. The story goes on until the Amphibian Man shows up, brought to the top-secret facility by Richard Strickland (portrayed by Michael Shannon), the incredibly complex and scary villain of the film. After that, the story gains complexity and we enter this amazing journey of love, which is also very typical in Guillermo del Toro’s work: the simplicity of life is the simplicity of love, we, the viewers, are just there to be reminded of that.

Before I finish, I just wanted to say that Sally Hawkins has an amazing role in this film: she plays a mute character, but she’s so, so good, she really deserves that nomination of hers. Also, Michael Shannon really scares you during the film and what amazes me is the fact that he didn’t get a nomination as a supporting character… All in all, I really think you should go watch this film and be prepared to be hypnotized by it for its whole duration, to laugh at the right times and to get out of the theatres realizing two things: Love is all that matters, and in terms of films, story is all that matters 😊 RATING: 9/10