LOVE ENCHANTS

STEPPING away from his big-budget work on Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak to return to the artisanal territory of his memorable early Spanish-language films,

The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro delivers pure enchantment with The Shape of Water.

A dark-edged fairy tale as lovingly steeped in vintage movie magic as it is in hypnotic water imagery, this captivating creature feature marries a portrait of morally corrupt early-1960s America with an outsider tale of love and friendship.

The movie opens with the words of Giles (Richard Jenkins) – over an underwater flat full of floating furniture – summoning a fairy tale of love and loss, about the long-ago final days in the reign of a princess without a voice, and

the monster who tried to destroy it all.

Giles’s only real friend is Elisa (Hawkins). Elsa’s other friend is Zelda (Octavia Spencer), her chatty co-worker on the midnight cleaning shift at an aerospace research facility.

Elisa is mute, communicating only with sign language. Intuitive with people, she’s also a ripely sensual woman.

When a secret experiment is rolled into the lab in a water tank, Elisa responds not with fear but with fascination and empathy.

Accompanying the primordial creature is ambitious government agent Strickland (Michael Shannon), a classic American by-product of Cold War paranoia, and Dr Robert Hoffstetler

(Michael Stuhlbarg), a marine biologist tasked with studying the creature’s unique lung structure for its possible application in the space race against Russia.

The crucial developments of the story concern the rare understanding and physical attraction that spark between Elisa and the creature.

She says he sees her for who