The Shape of Water

With The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro achieves a career highpoint.  The visionary Mexican filmmaker has directed ten features ranging from majestic, handcrafted, gothic horror like The Devil's Backbone (2001), to vapid, noisy, computer-generated junk like Pacific Rim (2013); from underappreciated gems like the insightful and inventive Cronos (1993), to overrated behemoths like the uneven patchwork Pan's Labyrinth (2006).  But all his signature obsessions and stylistic attributes align with deeply moving results in this dark fantasy that combines elements of multiple genres—monster movie, adult fairy tale, romantic drama, social satire, morality play, escape thriller, forbidden love story, dream picture, silent movie, Hollywood musical, and (literally) fish-out-of-water comedy.

Sally Hawkins (All or Nothing, Made in Dagenham, Blue Jasmine) stars as Elisa, a shy mute who works as a cleaning woman at a secret government laboratory located in Baltimore during the Cold War. She keeps to herself apart from friendships with her next-door neighbor (Richard Jenkins) and her lab co-worker (Octavia Spencer) who she communicates with via sign language and lip-reading. One day an army Colonel (Michael Shannon) arrives with a mysterious amphibious humanoid (Doug Jones) he captured from the Amazon and now wants to study for possible ascendancy over the Russians in the Space Race.  While the military wants to vivisect the creature, the lab’s head scientist (Michael Stuhlbarg) believes it has more to teach them if kept alive. As the powers-that-be fight over the merman’s fate, Elisa begins secretly visiting him, learning to communicate, and forming an inexplicable bond.

Del Toro’s confidence in his images has always been front-and-center in his pictures, often to their detriment—overshadowing the characters and the drama. For the first third of the film, the sheer ornateness of the production design, and the frustrating, constant floating movement of the camera (is this supposed to feel like gently flowing water? It makes every cut jolt like bumping into a rock or a log), reinforce the idea that the director is the real star of a Guillermo del Toro movie. But the beautifully realized characters eventually pull our attention away from the storytelling methods and ground us in the story itself. By the time the stakes and the action crank up in the third act, all aspects of this immoderate collection of literary and cinematic influences achieve a near-perfect balance. 

The terrific cast embraces the operatic extremes of the picture, making its eccentricities seem both credible and enchanting. Shannon, Stuhlbarg, Spencer and Jenkins—as well as Nick Searcy as a gruff General and John Kapelos as a Russian handler—all play in a broad style that could easily dissolve into caricature or stereotype were they not so committed to the film’s internal reality and tone. But The Shape of Water succeeds so brilliantly because of Hawkins, who brings genuine warmth, humanity, and accessibility to a role that, on the surface, would seem to evoke the opposite qualities. Were it not for her unforgettable turn as the lead in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), I’d call the near-silent Elisa the quintessential Sally Hawkins performance.