Guillermo del Toro’s fish tale is magical and dark
“The Shape of Water” is a sexy, violent, preposterous, beautiful fantasy, co-writer and director Guillermo del Toro’s most vivid and fully formed achievement since “Pan’s Labyrinth” 11 years ago. Set in 1962, the story del Toro fleshed out with co-writer Vanessa Taylor marries “Creature From the Black Lagoon” to “Beauty and the Beast,” referencing all sorts of other movies.
Yet this one is its own being. It’s exquisitely detailed and period-accurate when it wants to be, and a gorgeous fabrication when the emotions and the romance, nutty but sincere, require another side of del Toro’s imagination.
Sally Hawkins is Elisa, the mute janitor who, we’re told, was rescued from a river as a foundling. She bears two deep scars on her neck.
Elisa works the midnight-to-morning shift at a government research center somewhere in Baltimore. A new “asset” has been brought in for examination: He, or It, comes from the Amazon, has gills for breathing, legs for walking and wide, sideways-blinking eyes.
Initially unobserved by the scientists and the brutal government agent who discovered the creature, Elisa reaches across species, language and all known human/amphibian interaction to make a connection to this bluishcharcoal-tinged wonder. She introduces him to hard-boiled eggs and 33s borrowed from the record collection of her next-door neighbor. But the central courtship is fraught: The Russians know about this asset, and there are plans afoot to extract it from American clutches.
Director del Toro creates a stimulating array of characters, and he and co-writer Taylor find clever ways to rotate storylines and dovetail them in the nick of time.
Hawkins, her eyes alive with possibility, is the through-line in every scene. Ever-reliable, everwelcome Richard Jenkins plays her neighbor and friend Giles, a gay man pining for a younger man, as well as for a more accepting time.
Octavia Spencer, as Elisa’s fellow janitor Zelda, dispatches her role with ease, authority and great heart. Michael Shannon astutely judges every microsecond of menace as the heavy, adding trace elements of twisted levity, some scripted, some not. His character, Strickland, is a model family man from one angle, a patriot and God-fearing believer. From another, he is the monster to be vanquished.
Another splendid contemporary screen regular, Michael Stuhlbarg, plays a visiting researcher with a more complex resume than his colleagues realize. All these actors are enjoying their respective sweet spots in “The Shape of Water.” Del Toro’s dynamic camera sense challenges the performers to bring the fairy tale to life.
Like “Pan’s Labyrinth,” and virtually all del Toro’s work, “The Shape of Water” is not afraid of the dark. It’s sometimes tough to watch; I never like torture scenes, but they’re especially daunting when they involve Michael Shannon, a cattle prod and a vulnerable river monster, played by Doug Jones.
Elisa and her fellow outsiders make a memorable ad hoc team, fighting the forces of fear and conformity.
“The Shape of Water” is devoted, madly, to the notion of love as a state of liquid bliss, and we see that bliss and a hundred other emotions in Hawkins’ expressive performance.