Gorgeous, colour-coordinated fairy tale of a movie
Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape
of Water is like a beautiful painting you keep visiting at your favourite museum because it continues to reveal its brilliant magic in new and different ways.
Set in 1962, this is a gorgeously colour coordinated fairy tale. Del Toro’s use of the colour green alone is a wonder to behold, whether we’re taken aback by the almost neon glow of a piece of key lime pie, chuckling at the bright green shade of a plate of jiggling gelatin dessert, taking in the suitably aquatinged colours of the protagonist’s apartment, or appreciating the hue of a brand-new Cadillac. The Shape of Water is a Cold War-era Beauty and the Beast (with echoes of The Creature From the Black Lagoon, among other films). It takes place in the drab and yet somehow also electric Baltimore of the early 1960s, and it is a film that dares to be almost silly in its unabashed movie-style romanticism, and to the great credit of the writer-director and the wonderful cast, it succeeds at almost every turn.
Sally Hawkins, as fine an actor as you’ll see working these days, gives a sweet and funny and lovely and moving performance as Elisa, a mute dreamer who works the overnight shift as a maid in a topsecret government facility and falls in love with a mysterious sea creature that was captured in the Amazon and is now being held in shackles, tortured and prepped for execution and vivisection.
When will these shortsighted government types ever realise that if you come across a once-in-a-lifetime sea creature or alien being, you might want to spend some time observing its habits before killing the thing and cutting it up?
Actually, for being such a top-secret government lab, the Occam Corp., as it’s known, is kind of lax on the whole security thing. I mean, they’ve just brought in an amphibious, gilled creature that looks like he’s half-man, half-fish and yet they often leave it alone in a tank, shackled on a chain, with not a human in sight.
So without much interference, Elisa is able to strike up a friendship with Amphibian Man (Doug Jones). That may sound bizarre because it is bizarre, but considering Elisa was an orphan whose throat was slashed as a baby, and who then was found literally floating in a river, perhaps she feels an innate kinship with the Amphibian Man before she can even understand it. Elisa feeds him eggs; she sneaks in a turntable and plays romantic music for him; she teaches him sign language. Within a few days she’s positively giddy, and it appears as if Amphibian Man has feelings for Elisa as well. Oh, but of course there are complications. Michael Stuhlbarg is Dr Robert Hoffstetler, a sympathetic scientist with a complicated backstory. Is he friend or foe? Then there’s Michael Shannon’s Richard Strickland, the gung-ho G-man in charge of security. It’s already been established Strickland is a sadistic creep who gleefully uses a cattle prod on his prized capture, but after Amphibian Man bites off a couple of Strickland’s fingers, Strickland turns into a completely unhinged, pill-popping psycho. Elisa has a couple of allies: her fellow maid, Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer), and her across-the-hall neighbour, Giles (Richard Jenkins), a closeted, alcoholic advertising artist with a passion for watching glorious old black-andwhite movies on TV. As The Shape of Water becomes a tick-tock thriller, with Elisa and her team desperate to save Amphibian Man and nefarious forces hellbent on destroying him, I can’t say I was swept up in the love story. I found myself admiring and appreciating this film more than falling in love with it.
NOMINATED FOR: Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Original Music Score, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Costume Design, Best Sound Mixing, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing