The Shape of Water (2017)
IMDB Rating 8.1/10 (as on 23.12.2017)
R | 2h 3min | Adventure, Drama, Fantasy
In a 1960s research facility, a mute janitor forms a relationship with an aquatic creature.
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Writers: Guillermo del Toro (screenplay by), Vanessa Taylor (screenplay by)
Stars: Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon
IMDB link Here
Movie Rating ★★★★☆
Xan Brooks
Guillermo del Toro’s new film is a ravishing 60s-set romance, sweet, sad and sexy. It’s about two lonely hearts who like to meet up during lunch break at work, passing food back and forth and listening to records on a portable turntable. Together, they overcome their impediments and start merrily bounding over all the hurdles in their path – such as the fact that lovelorn Elisa is mute, unable to speak since she was a child. Or that her boyfriend has fins and gills and lives underwater, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The course of true love was never meant to run smooth.
I confess that I’ve been agnostic about Del Toro in the past – filing the Mexican film-maker away as an ideas man; a director who shoots for the moon only to fall slightly short. But I really liked The Shape of Water, which plays in competition here at Venice. It feels less of a fevered artistic exercise than his other recent work; more seamless and successful in the way it orders its material. Yes, Del Toro’s latest flight of fancy sets out to liberally pastiche the postwar monster movie, doffing its cap to the incident at Roswell and all manner of related cold war paranoia. But it’s warmer and richer than the films that came before. Beneath that glossy, scaly surface is a beating heart.
Sally Hawkins gives a lovely, limber performance as Elisa, the cleaner at a shady Baltimore laboratory, swabbing out the toilets alongside the hard-bitten Zelda (Octavia Spencer). “Some of the best minds in the country,” sniffs Zelda disapprovingly, “and they still pee all over the floor in here.” Then one morning a big metal tank is wheeled into the basement. It contains an exotic amphibian, mute like Elisa and recently fished from a South American river. The creature is dangerous – it devours cats and human fingers. But Elisa is entranced and takes to stealing downstairs whenever she has time to spare, placing hard-boiled eggs on the rim of the tank and waiting for the beast to come and eat his lunch.
The Shape of Water isn’t simply a romance, but a B-movie thriller as well – which naturally means the clandestine meetings can’t last. Prowling the corridors, swinging his nightstick, is Michael Shannon’s Strickland, a brutal government goon who styles himself as the monster’s tormentor-in-chief. “That thing we keep in there is an affront,” he barks at the cleaners. “You know what that means?” So Elisa finds herself embroiled in a three-way tug-of-war. Strickland wants to dissect the beast; the Soviets want to capture it. So Elisa embarks on a fraught rescue mission – aided at various turns by the redoubtable Zelda and her middle-aged, gay best friend (Richard Jenkins), who lives in the apartment next door.
Who can say whether these two star-crossed lovers will find their own perfect ending? The odds remain stacked against them, while the motto on the wall calendar strikes a cautionary note. “Life,” it reminds us, “is just the shipwreck of our plans.” But in the meantime here they are, lying low inside a flea-bitten apartment, like Robert Redford and Jane Fonda in Barefoot in the Park. Elisa is happy and horny and very nearly free. She used to begin every working day by masturbating in the bath. She now has an exciting new partner waiting for her in the tub.
Read complete review at The Guardian
Stepping away from his big-budget studio work on Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak to return closer to the more artisanal territory of his memorable early Spanish-language films The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro delivers pure enchantment with The Shape of Water. A dark-edged fairy tale as lovingly steeped in vintage movie magic as it is in hypnotic water imagery, this captivating creature feature marries a portrait of morally corrupt early-1960s America with an outsider tale of love and friendship molded by a master storyteller.
Centered on an exquisite performance from Sally Hawkins that conveys both delicacy and strength, this is a visually and emotionally ravishing fantasy that should find a welcome embrace from audiences starved for imaginative escape.
Following Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water shows signs of del Toro having taken on board the criticisms widely leveled at that lush gothic horror-melodrama. The extravagant design elements and overburdened plotting of the 2015 feature tended to smother much of the story's genuine emotion, pointing up the shortage of depth in flat characters that invited too little lasting investment. The new picture, by contrast, applies Paul Denham Austerberry's dazzling production design and Dan Laustsen's graceful cinematography to a poignant story in which good and evil are represented in richly drawn figures played by a first-rate principal cast.
The iconic image used here of an amphibious humanoid cradling an unconscious woman is a direct homage to The Creature From the Black Lagoon. Del Toro plays free and easy with the '60s setting by referencing not only 1950s horror but also movie musicals of the '30s and '40s, classic noir and even Cinemascope biblical epics. Those nods inject notes of playful humor and fantasy that expand our responses to the story and characters, rather than merely dabbling in pastiche.
While blood red, unsurprisingly, was the dominant hue of Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water also takes its defining color cue from its title. Del Toro and his visual team paint in an infinite palette of green shades, from soothing aquamarine to the harsh oxide tones of mid-century institutional buildings; from the neon garishness of a gelatin parfait to the gleaming metallic teal of a brand new Cadillac.
The movie opens with the words of Giles (Richard Jenkins) — over an underwater apartment full of floating furniture — summoning a fairy tale of love and loss, about the long-ago final days in the reign of a princess without a voice, and the monster who tried to destroy it all.
The self-described "proverbial starving artist," Giles lives with his cats in a Baltimore apartment above a struggling movie palace and directly below the apartment of his only real friend, Elisa (Hawkins). Giles is gay, pushed out of his job as an advertising illustrator, it's suggested, by a whiff of scandal, and now consumed by unrequited love for the handsome counter staffer (Morgan Kelly) at a local diner serving sickeningly sweet pies with fake-Southern hospitality. Elisa, too, lives in relative isolation, though her friendship with Giles is matched by an equally affectionate closeness to Zelda (Octavia Spencer), her chatty co-worker on the midnight cleaning shift at an aerospace research facility.
Though her hearing is unimpaired, Elisa is mute, communicating only with sign language. An orphan who is intuitive in her interactions with people, she's also a ripely sensual woman, routinely masturbating in the bathtub each evening while she hard-boils eggs to take to work as a snack. When a secret classified experiment is rolled into the lab in a water tank, Elisa responds not with fear but with fascination and, upon closer inspection, empathy.
While a spoiler alert seems necessary, it's also largely irrelevant given that Fox Searchlight has fully revealed the gilled creature in the movie's trailer. The fact that the expressive, other-worldly being is played by Doug Jones, who appeared as the similarly amphibious Abe Sapien in del Toro's Hellboy movies, is an additional sign of the personal thread connecting The Shape of Water to the director's distinctive body of work.
Del Toro and co-writer Vanessa Taylor (Divergent) seamlessly weave in points about societal intolerance toward otherness that pertain no less to a nonhuman discovery than to gay or black Americans in the early '60s. There also are amusing digs at a consumer culture in which status and success increasingly were being defined by purchasing power, while old-fashioned standards of decency were fast receding. Strickland is most emblematic of this, at one point glimpsed reading The Power of Positive Thinking, and later, when things start to go haywire, informing his gruff military superior (Nick Searcy) without a hint of irony: "I can't be in a negative frame of mind."
But the crucial developments of the story concern the rare understanding and physical attraction that spark between Elisa and the creature, starting with the gift of a boiled egg and continuing with the language of music from a portable stereo. She says he sees her for who she really is, as a complete person, which gets Giles and eventually Zelda on board to help as the conflicting agendas of Strickland and Hoffstetler threaten the creature's survival.
Del Toro and editor Sidney Wolinsky allow the pace to dip a little before the suspenseful late-action crescendo. But the film's refusal to treat the woman-humanoid relationship as anything less than a classic, swoon-worthy love story, albeit one explored entirely without conventional dialogue, means our rooting interest in the central dynamic is never in doubt.
While the remarkable Hawkins carries every scene with her tender emotional transparency and joyously unabashed desire, the superb work from Jenkins, Stuhlbarg, Shannon and the wryly amusing Spencer — along with the vital roles their characters play in the unfolding action — makes this a robustly populated story. And the work of Jones cannot be over-praised in portraying the creature as a sentient being with a soulful inner life, driven by a yearning no less persuasive than that of Elisa.
Complemented throughout by a sumptuously melodic score from Alexandre Desplat, with gentle accordion strains that underline the affecting story's disarming sweetness, along with snatches of the classic musical tunes (and corresponding snippets of dance!) that Giles and Elisa love, this meticulously crafted jewel is del Toro's most satisfying work since Pan's Labyrinth.
Read complete review at Hollywood Reporter
Del Toro's fish tale is magical, romantic and dark
Michael Phillips
The Shape of Water” is a sexy, violent, preposterous, beautiful fantasy, co-writer and director Guillermo del Toro’s most vivid and fully formed achievement since “Pan’s Labyrinth” 11 years ago. Set in 1962, the story del Toro fleshed out with co-writer Vanessa Taylor marries “Creature from the Black Lagoon” to “Beauty and the Beast,” referencing all sorts of other movies.
Yet this one is its own being. It’s exquisitely detailed and period-accurate when it wants to be, and a gorgeous fabrication when the emotions and the underwater Cloud Cuckoo-Land romance, nutty but sincere, require another side of del Toro’s imagination.
Elisa works the midnight-to-morning shift at a government research center somewhere in Baltimore. A new “asset” has been brought in for examination: He, or It, comes from the Amazon, has gills for breathing, legs for walking, and wide, sideways-blinking eyes. These last two items are a fantastic touch, a reminder that digital effects needn’t look like every other digital effect on the market.
Initially unobserved by the scientists and the brutal government agent who discovered the creature, Elisa reaches across species, language and all known human/amphibian interaction to make a connection to this bluish-charcoal-tinged wonder. She introduces him to hard-boiled eggs and sentimental 33s borrowed from the record collection of her next-door neighbor. But the central courtship is fraught: The Russians know about this asset, and there are plans afoot to extract it from American clutches.
Scored to composer Alexandre Desplat’s first-rate waltz theme, “The Shape of Water” has something for everyone. In the first five minutes, Elisa’s work-preparation routine’s established: She boils her eggs, sets the egg timer for a quick bath (masturbation included) and then she’s off to work. Director del Toro creates a stimulating array of characters, and he and co-writer Taylor find clever ways to rotate storylines and dovetail them in the nick of time.
Octavia Spencer, as Elisa’s fellow janitor Zelda, dispatches her role with ease, authority and great heart. Michael Shannon astutely judges every microsecond of menace as the heavy, adding trace elements of twisted levity, some scripted, some not. His character, Strickland, is a model family man from one angle, a true-blue patriot and God-fearing believer. From another, he is the monster to be vanquished, because he has no patience with foreign residents, or anyone who dares question his place in the world.
Another splendid contemporary screen regular, Michael Stuhlbarg, plays a visiting researcher with a more complex resume than his colleagues realize. All these actors are enjoying their respective sweet spots in “The Shape of Water.” In a less interesting movie, you might find the casting predictable, but del Toro’s dynamic camera sense, even in the simplest expository dialogue scenes, challenges the performers to bring it, and to bring the fairy tale to life.
Like “Pan’s Labyrinth,” and virtually all del Toro’s work, “The Shape of Water” is not afraid of the dark. It’s bloody and sometimes tough to watch; I never like torture scenes, but they’re especially daunting when they involve Michael Shannon; a cattle prod; and a vulnerable river monster, played by Doug Jones. The nudity will throw the prudes for a loop, I suppose, and may cut out younger audience members whose parents let their kids watch any ol’ violence but get nervous around bare skin.
Whatever. The 12-year-old me likely would’ve fallen under this film’s spell, as the older me did. Elisa and her fellow outsiders make a memorable ad hoc team, fighting the forces of fear and conformity. There are times in “The Shape of Water” when you wouldn’t mind a little less of the dreamy atmospherics and a little more pace. The full-body introduction of the creature is a little disappointing in its offhandedness, and the montage-reliant bridge sequences detailing Elisa and the creature’s early dates are a bit perfunctory.
But so many individual images carry real magic, from simple transitions (Elisa tracing raindrops on a bus window, blurring into a shot of strolling feet at the research center) to the grander sweep of the underwater footage. “The Shape of Water” is devoted, madly, to the notion of love as a state of liquid bliss, and we see that bliss and a hundred other emotions in Hawkins’ nonverbal (mostly) but endlessly expressive performance.
Read complete review at Chicago Tribune
Movie Rating ★★★★☆
Wildly fantastical with echoes of King Kong... and might just be Oscar-worthy
BRIAN VINER
Last time we saw her, in the period drama Maudie, Sally Hawkins was playing a woman blighted by galloping arthritis. It was a gloomy film, but its humanity, and that of her character, shone from the slow, bright smile that Hawkins seems able to turn on in increments.
In Guillermo del Toro’s marvellous fantasy The Shape of Water, which is set in 1962 and which I predict will get a raft of awards (possibly starting here at the Venice Film Festival, where it had its premiere yesterday), she’s at it again.
She plays Elisa, who has been mute since childhood, yet has a wonderfully articulate smile. Lots of things make Elisa happy. She loves the movies, loves copying dance steps from the television, and in a platonic way she loves her neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins), an ageing illustrator whose career, it is hinted, has been derailed by his homosexuality. Elisa herself is single, but del Toro leaves us in no doubt that she is a sensual, sexual being.
She works as a cleaner at a government facility in Baltimore, where one day a highly sensitive “asset” arrives to be housed. Half-man, half-fish, but wholly monstrous, it has been found in the Amazon basin where it was worshipped as a god, and dragged back to the US in the hope that its amphibious powers might be of some use in the raging Cold War.
Del Toro very cleverly keeps all this racing along with the heart-pumping intensity of a Cold War thriller. His masterpiece is generally assumed to be the 2006 Spanish-language film Pan's Labyrinth, but for my money, this is every bit its equal. And while also keeping it moving as a thriller, he meticulously depicts the domestic lives of his characters. Anyone who saw the TV drama Mad Men, for instance, will see in Strickland, as he goes home each night to his loving, materialistic wife and two carefully-groomed children, more than a glimmer of Jon Hamm’s Don Draper.
None of this, however, unfolds at the expense of the story’s wildly fantastical elements, stunningly shot by cinematographer Dan Laustsen who, as a Dane, might appreciate the Hans Christian Andersen flourishes. There are echoes of King Kong, too, and even more obviously, of Creature From The Black Lagoon. At first I wondered whether this strange, powerful creature might be a metaphor for the atomic bomb, but if anything it represents love. When Elisa does finally manage to spirit it out of Strickland’s dastardly clutches, one of cinema’s more unusual couplings ensues.
It is hard to over-state how good Hawkins is in this role. Speech is an actor’s most potent weapon, but she gives a masterclass in how you to move and charm an audience without it. Of course, she also gets superb support. Shannon, such a powerful performer, is as brilliant as ever. And Jenkins is terrific too, as is the always-reliable Octavia Spencer as Elisa’s trusted workmate, Zelda. But with Daniel Day-Lewis retired, maybe the next Brit to take the Academy Awards by storm will be Hawkins. For if ever I saw one, this is a performance deserving of an Oscar.
Read complete review at Daily Mail
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