My Friday blog is a little late. I have no excuses other than that I have been wiped at work and exhausted when I get home. But! It does give me the opportunity to review The Shape of Water, which I saw last night with friends. I’m sure there are a lot better reviews out there, but here are my thoughts.
Warning: this review contains spoilers.
Guillermo del Toro is one of my favourite directors. There’s just something about his films which combine fantasy and terror and beauty which definitely appeals. This film is a gorgeous tribute to old Hollywood, monster movies, outsiders, and love.
The film focuses on Eliza Esposito (Sally Hawkins), an orphan found near the river in Baltimore with strange scars on her neck reminiscent of gills. She is mute, and we learn that she lives above a cinema run by migrants, next door to a gay, recovering alcoholic artist Giles (Richard Jenkins). She works nights cleaning a top-secret government facility with her friend Zelda (Octavia Spencer) when a strange amphibious humanoid creature (Doug Jones) is brought in under the supervision of Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon) and scientist Dr Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), secretly a Russian spy. Eliza befriends the creature with empathy, compassion, and boiled eggs. She teaches it to communicate with basic sign language, and appreciate music.
Meanwhile, Strickland has found nothing from the creature using torture tactics. He wishes to vivisect the creature in order to use its unique breathing apparatus to gain advantage in the space race. Eliza, learning of this, enlists Giles to help her rescue the creature from the facility. She is discovered by both Zelda and Hoffstetler, who help her transport the creature to her home. Eliza then keeps the creature in her bathtub, planning to release him to the sea as soon as the rain fills the canals. Strickland does not give the creature up easily, however. He spends the remainder of the movie, his life, and much of his sanity it seems, trying to retrieve the creature.
The Shape of Water is a multi award winning film. In my humble opinion, it deserves them all. There’s fascinating commentary on the development of technology in early 1960s Cold War America. Much of the film focuses on the “future” - cars, franchise businesses, new foodstuffs, medicine, space exploration. At the same time the world clings to tradition - women’s roles, the reality of life for gay men, African Americans, migrants...anyone “different”. What is progress, and is all progress good? The conflict between tradition and progress is an interesting subtext. We are told in different contexts that green is the colour of the future, yet the green pie is disgusting, the green car gets wrecked.
One of Eliza’s defining moments is a passionate plea to Giles to gain his help in the rescue. She argues that it doesn’t matter that the creature is not human, but that they are. If they do not help him/it, they themselves are no better than monsters. It raises questions of humanity not just for the creature, but elsewhere in society - gay men, African Americans, migrants. Has much changed in how we view “others” now?
Another defining moment is a dream sequence, where mute Eliza sings to and dances with the creature in homage to old Hollywood. She is letting go and saying goodbye to the creature, who has deteriorated out of his natural habitat. It is a defining moment because voiceless Eliza is able to give her feelings sound as well as movement as she has not been able to do so before. It also highlights the romantic and fantasy elements of the film. This scene plays in nicely with several other moments in the film - a sitting dance with Giles while watching an old film, the red shoes (ruby slippers) she admires in a window and later buys and wears to work after being intimate with the creature.
On that note, I know a lot of people were expecting this film to have explicit sex between Eliza and the creature. Their intimacy is really only hinted at - and it is clearly intimacy, though Eliza is refreshingly matter-of-fact about her sexual needs. She maturbates every day after setting an egg timer so she doesn’t fall behind schedule, and is the one to initiate intimacy with the creature*. What we see is that they are both gentle and caring of the other. In contrast, the explicit sex is between Strickland and his wife. This is a much more brutal and uncomfortable affair in which neither are fully naked and Strickland ignores his wife’s discomfort over his bleeding fingers (bitten off by the creature and subsequently reattached) to the point of covering her mouth to make her be silent. There is no intimacy here, just the meeting of a need and the fulfilling of a duty. Again, the dichotomy between past and future is shown.
The whole film is visually gorgeous, from the watery opening sequence to the angles and lighting used throughout. The sets are rich, fantastic. Eliza’s home above the theatre is both roomy and homey, Gile’s cluttered with the detritus of age, the government facility a literal grey-green concrete bunker, the Russian spy’s home a soulless facade. Strickland’s home is so scarily yellow that it is clearly not the future, but set squarely in the past. The theatre is rich, the diner dim and nostalgic while being brand new.
Not so gorgeous, but definitely important was the visual deterioration of Strickland’s reattached fingers. Out of the whole film, the scenes where his hand is specifically in focus made me want to gag. Even before the fingers are gone, Strickland washes his hands before, but not after, using the urinals. Then, once the fingers have been reattached we see their colour change over the course of the film. Towards the end of the film his fingers are completely rotten, mirroring his inner deterioration.
On a final note, like many others, I really wanted The Shape of Water to be an Abe Sapien (Dark Horse Comics, Hellboy) film. Sadly, it is not. Despite the similarities - sealed in a glass tube in a government facility, love of eggs and classical music, costume design, “The Asset” and Abe are not the same.
I enjoyed this movie. It’s been described as Beauty and the Beast, but I think it’s a little bit Shrek too in its championship of the “outsider”. What makes us human or beast? Is it possible to tell by appearance? Do only humans have humanity?
Have you seen this movie? Tell me what you thought in the comments below!
Deanna x