A beautiful, tingling blood-curdler
The Shape of Water 15 cert, 119 min
Guillermo del Toro Starring
Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Doug Jones, Octavia Spencer, Michael Stuhlbarg
Guillermo del Toro’s films are often as sensuously contorted as the beasts that lurk within them, but his latest is a pretzel-twist of pure strangeness, even by his standards. The Shape of Water is the story of a human woman who has an illicit love affair with a swamp monster, and is played with all the swoony sincerity of a classic thwarted romance. A Golden Lion winner at Venice last year, and now in the running for 12 Baftas and 13 Oscars, it’s both an honest-to-god B-movie blood-curdler and a boundlessly beautiful melodrama: think Creature from the Black Lagoon directed by Douglas Sirk.
Which is to say, it is del Toro through and through. This is not, let’s be frank, a premise that would sprout from many places other than the dank and loamy mind behind Pan’s Labyrinth and Crimson Peak. But the combination works. The setting is postwar USA, with the civil rights movement and the threat of Soviet supremacy bubbling in the background. The future is right at hand, yet no one seems too certain of their place in it.
Even a cleaning lady like Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is living life step by step. She lives alone in an apartment above a crumbling cinema in downtown Baltimore, counting the days with a tear-off calendar, and working nights at the pointedly named Occam Aerospace Research Centre, where the strange goings-on defy a neatly razored explanation. The films on the marquee below Elisa’s window (The Story of Ruth and a half-forgotten Pat Boone musical called Mardi Gras, both playing in “triumphant return”) place the action in the early Sixties, but as so often with the Mexican director, the whole thing glimmers with a fairy-tale timelessness.
An opening narration, provided by Elisa’s neighbour, Giles (Richard Jenkins), describes her as “a princess without a voice” – the film’s poetic way of breaking it to us that she’s a lifelong mute, after having her vocal cords cut in the crib. The visible trace is a set of three slender scars on the side of her throat – and despite her quick command of sign language, she’s long since acclimatised to not being heard.
That’s one big thing that makes The Asset (Doug Jones) different from so many of the men in her life. He listens. Another is that he’s an amphibious inhuman, dragged to Occam in the hope that study of his complex respiratory system can give the United States an edge in the ongoing space race. Its captor is a government agent called Strickland (Michael Shannon), who swings an enormous, electrified truncheon like he’s compensating for something, and is spotted one evening by Elisa and her plain-speaking friend and colleague, Zelda (Octavia Spencer), staggering from its containment unit, blotched with blood.
The two women are drafted on the spot to mop up – and Elisa makes an unlikely connection with the creature that slowly intensifies, entirely non-verbally, until she realises she has no choice but to stage a rescue attempt.
For any number of reasons, Elisa is the kind of role that comes along just once a lifetime, and Hawkins meets it with the performance of one, wedding her keen observational eye and puckish comic touch to an emotional intensity and shivery eroticism that make you wriggle with delight.
An early bathtub scene establishes Elisa as an enthusiastically sexual being, regardless of the lack of a partner at hand. It’s just a side of herself that she keeps intensely private. Jenkins’s Giles is similarly cagey, though for different reasons: he’s in the closet, with a love-life that doesn’t extend beyond gentle flirtations with the guy behind the counter at his local diner. When Elisa tells him about the creature, it takes a while for him to understand that its plight, and his, are both part of the same struggle. When civil rights marchers appear on the news, his instinct is to switch over to a vintage musical.
Even Shannon’s fearsome Strickland is being ground down by forces beyond his control, from the demands of his military overseers to his determination to be seen as a success on society’s terms. “This is the car of the future, and you strike me as a man on his way there!” a Cadillac salesman chirpily tells him – so, of course, five minutes later, he’s in the driver seat.
Extending compassion to the bad guy is a classic del Toro manoeuvre, and the car dealership interlude itself is just one scene here among many here that only a filmmaker working at the peak of their powers would even think to create. The film commits to each and every one of these moments, big and small, with an honesty and warmth that’s reflected in every aspect of its craft, from Dan Laustsen’s luminous cinematography to Alexandre Desplat’s elegantly swooning score. Like the best bath you’ve ever had, it sends tingles coursing through all the parts of you that other films don’t reach.