A creature feature that’s boundlessly beautiful
The Shape of Water TBC cert, 119 min
Dir 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 monstrous creatures that lurk within them, but his latest is a pretzel-twist of pure strangeness, even by his standards. The Shape of Water, which premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival yesterday, is an honest-to-god B-movie blood-curdler that’s also, somehow, a shimmeringly earnest and boundlessly beautiful melodrama: think Creature from the Black Lagoon directed by Douglas Sirk.
It offers what must be cinema’s uneasiest probing of the postwar American psyche since Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master.
The bright-eyed heroine of the piece is Elisa (Sally Hawkins), who lives alone in an apartment above a crumbling repertory cinema in downtown Baltimore, and works nights as a charlady 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, it also has the timeless glow of fairy tale.
An opening narration, provided by Elisa’s neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins), describes her as “a princess without a voice”. It’s the film’s poetic way of breaking it to us that she’s a lifelong mute, after having her vocal cords cut in early childhood. Thanks to this horrific act of abuse, 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.
Elisa is, for any number of reasons, the kind of role that comes along once a lifetime, and Hawkins rises to it
Another is that he’s an amphibious humanoid swamp thing, dragged to Occam for vivisection in the hope that study of his complex respiratory system can give the United States an edge in the ongoing space race.
His captor is a government agent called Strickland (Michael Shannon), who 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, over the film’s opening half. And then – with paranoia reigning at Occam, and a Soviet plot to kidnap the creature unfolding in the shadows – she realises she has no choice but to stage a rescue attempt.
Elisa is, for any number of reasons, the kind of role that comes along just once a lifetime, and Hawkins rises to it. The London-born actress’s keen observational eye, technical control and puckish comic touch have always been evident, but here they’re wed 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 – and in fact, it’s a side of herself she keeps intensely private.
Jenkins’s Giles is similarly cagey, though for different reasons: an illustrator for an advertising agency, he’s quietly gay, with a love life that doesn’t extend beyond gentle flirtations with the guy behind the counter at his local diner.
But when Elisa tells him about the creature, his inability to see its plight as part of a larger struggle that includes his own is a splintery character flaw, deftly played by Jenkins – just as he grimaces when civil rights marchers appear on the nightly news, and switches over to the comforts of a vintage musical. Even the fearsome Strickland is being squeezed 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 in one of a handful of riveting forays into this brute’s domestic life.
The car dealership interlude is just one scene among many here that only a filmmaker working at the peak of their powers would even think to create. Another involves Elisa watching beads of rain waltz across the passenger window of a bus – an ecstatic evocation of her changing connection to the outside world.
Let’s just say there are significantly greater surprises in store than dancing water droplets, and the film commits to each and every one with a fullhearted sincerity and warmth that’s reflected in every aspect of its craft. Like the best bath you’ve ever had, it sends tingles coursing through every part of you that other films don’t reach.
The Shape of Water screens at the London Film Festival in October and will be released in UK cinemas in Feb 2018