ENTERTAINMENT
WMORE AT FACEBOOK.COM/POTTSTOWNMERCURY e’ve been trained to expect the unexpected from Guillermo del Toro. The Mexican auteur has infused his unique vision and intelligence into movies about bizarre comic book antiheroes (“Hellboy” I and II), giant battle robots (“Pacific Rim”) and gothic horror (“Crimson Peak”), while investing the most of his singular design genius and psychological insight into smaller, more personal and historically informed pieces such as “Cronos,” “The Devil’s Backbone” and “Pan’s Labyrinth.”
Now del Toro has taken all of his creative passion to the wall with “The Shape of Water.” A fable like no other, it’s a Cold War-era tale of a mute janitor named Elisa Esposito (English actress Sally Hawkins) who falls in love with a recently discovered half-fish, half-man thing (del Toro’s go-to creature player Doug Jones in the scaly suit) being held at the secret government facility she cleans. With the help of her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), work partner Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and Soviet mole Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), Elisa plots the manimal’s escape from the unforgiving control of government agent Strickland (Michael Shannon).
And then discovers that she wouldn’t want to live without the creature.
Dizzyingly romantic and dazzlingly gorgeous, the movie addresses eternal American issues while staging sequence after sequence that only del Toro could have imagined. We talked to the filmmaker about what looks like the ultimate expression of his lifelong monster love. AND TWITTER.COM/MERCURYX