Del Toro’s newfound shape
THE SHAPE OF WATER Direction: Guillermo del Toro Actors: Sally Hawkins, Doug Jones Rating:
Drawing on his lifelong fascination with the myth and magic of B-movie creature features, maverick Mexican director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) fashions an inter-species romantic fantasy that will sweep even the most jaded viewers off their feet.
The Shape of Water evokes the dreamy lyricism of a fairy tale, but is set in the paranoia-driven Cold War 1960s.
The pithy script, co-authored by del Toro and Vanessa Taylor, tells of an unlikely romance between a mute young woman (Sally Hawkins) and an amphibian humanoid imprisoned at the government facility where she works as a janitor.
Determined to free the captured ‘asset’ (Doug Jones, under layers of prosthetics), she seeks the help of her elderly neighbour (Richard Jenkins), a middle-aged colleague (Octavia Spencer) and a rogue scientist (Michael Stuhlbarg).
The film is bathed in a luscious palette of reds, greens and dark blues, and constantly harks back to Hollywood’s golden era. The heroine lives above a fading movie palace of yore. There’s a dance interlude shot in black-and-white.
Production designer Paul Austerberry and music composer Alexandre Desplat do a stellar job, but it’s Sally Hawkins that makes the film gleam. In a year when the competition for Best Actress is particularly strong, she is a clear front-runner for the Oscar.
Maintaining ‘a tender balance of the beautiful and the different’, del Toro’s film is suffused with a humanism that is bracing, and sadly seldom seen in today’s films.