The Shape of Water
In the event that over a dozen award nominations have yet to convince you to watch The Shape of Water, I’ll gladly belabor the point further with this: it’s one of the most remarkable films to come out in the past year. Fans of Guillermo del Toro will recognize the director’s arresting aesthetic signature in every scene, from his characteristic use of color and shadow to the urgently relevant themes that he and co-writer Vanessa Taylor have incorporated into the work. Set in Baltimore during the Cold War, The Shape of Water follows a mute and socially isolated woman played by Sally Hawkins, who works as a cleaning lady in a government facility along with her close friend and interpreter played by Octavia Spencer. One day, when tasked with cleaning a room drenched in blood, Hawkins’ character comes into contact with a strange, amphibious, sentient humanoid creature that the facility’s operatives are trying to keep top-secret, while also running horrific experiments on it. Hawkins grows fond of the creature, which brings her into conflict with a military colonel played by Michael Shannon, the man who abducted the creature in the first place and the film’s primary antagonist.
Perhaps unexpected for a movie broadly about a woman falling in love with a fish-man, The Shape of Water makes shockingly poignant commentary on American society, brought into focus through del Toro’s unique sensibility for portraying the socially marginalized and their acts of resistance. The film, set against the turbulent backdrop of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Cold War, is only slightly more political than del Toro’s previous notable films, Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone, both of which are set in post-WWII Spain and incorporate powerful anti-fascist themes. Despite the depiction of Baltimore in The Shape of Water as a bustling, modern American city — where conspicuous consumerism has rendered everything from movie theaters to car dealerships with gilded glamour — del Toro doesn’t let his audience forget the ubiquity of prejudice in American society. Sharp and jarring scenes variously depict ableism, sexism, homophobia, racism and misogynoir: such as one scene where a friendly conversation between two white men at a diner is interrupted when the proprietor tells an African-American couple they cannot sit inside the restaurant. Shannon’s colonel is a terrifying and effectively-written intersection of several oppressive identities bound into a single character; he embodies whiteness, toxic hetero-masculinity, and militarized capitalist violence all at once. And Hawkins’ technically disabled but admirably strong-willed character is nevertheless capable of combating this violent force if it means she can liberate the one she loves, regardless of how unorthodox or impossible her relationship with a so-called ‘monster’ might seem.
The movie is worth seeing for the end shot alone, concluding a final sequence that fans of Pan’s Labyrinth might find familiar but no less cathartic. So much about this film is pure magic: the gorgeous set and costume designs, the eclectic diversity of the soundtrack, and the incredibly compelling performances by Hawkins, Spencer, and pretty much everyone else on cast. This all comes together to make a film that’s already been recognized with numerous awards, and is sure to win more in the coming weeks. With The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro offers us, in his usual modern fairytale style, a parable about love and resistance, both timely in its pertinence to our troubled contemporary age, and breathtakingly timeless in its message about the human condition.
