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“The Shape of Water” Doesn’t Deliver

Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winner didn’t blow me out of the water

Dr. Casey Lawrence
Reviewsday Tuesday
Published in
4 min readDec 3, 2024

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Screenshot from The Shape of Water © Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2017 (via IMDB), featuring Doug Jones and Sally Hawkins

The Shape of Water (2017) is your classic Beauty and the Beast fairytale.

Set during the Cold War, a mute cleaning woman, Elisa (Sally Hawkins), discovers a merman (Doug Jones) is being kept chained and abused at the government lab where she works the night shift. She bonds with the creature and learns that he is capable of sign language.

The antagonist, Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon) is cartoonishly villainous when he decides to vivisect he creature (at least partially as punishment for biting two of his fingers off). This prompts Elisa to stage a rescue mission with the help of her friends Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and Giles (Richard Jenkins), and the quick thinking of a Russian spy-turned-collaborator (Michael Stuhlbarg).

While harboring the fugitive amphibian man, Elisa falls in love with the fish and they do the deed, apparently.

But here’s the thing: if you’re going to try to make Monster Romance (a very popular genre in the romance community) “mainstream,” you’ve got to commit to it.

The Shape of Water doesn’t work because it doesn’t contain monster fucking.

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Reviewsday Tuesday
Reviewsday Tuesday

Published in Reviewsday Tuesday

A home for reviews of all kinds — reviews of books, movies, venues, products, travel destinations, you name it!

Dr. Casey Lawrence
Dr. Casey Lawrence

Written by Dr. Casey Lawrence

Canadian author of three LGBT YA novels. PhD from Trinity College Dublin. Check out my lists for stories by genre/type.

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