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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
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.