Guillermo Del Toro is all Love, Lust, and Monsters in the Magnificent 'The Shape of Water'

It takes a lot in our day and age for an audience to overlook controversy, or at least artistically ‘bizarre’ choices in film. There is no mystery why the infamous child sex scene was scrapped from the 2017 remake of Stephen King’s IT; the book had nearly 1100 pages to justify it, where the film had just over two hours. This discomfort and inability to accept the portrayal of taboo subjects is intrinsically linked to our modern media obsession, which over the past 40 years has grown to become an inherent part of our culture. With viewers facing a bombardment of opinions and critiques from increasingly accessible sources, what chance does a film have against our predeterminations?

You may have heard of the recent Best Picture winner The Shape of Water as ‘that one with the fish man sex’. That film that’s hung in your periphery as the artsy magical realism flick that falls just outside of your interests as a viewer. Indeed you may have even gone out of your way to see this movie and feel the same regardless. Its presence in the cinematic year is familiar. From The Artist to The Tree of Life, there seems to be a whole subsection of films that define the distance between the Academy and the public. In The Shape of Water’s case, this certainly isn’t aided by the fast spread Twitter and YouTube commentary that effectively reduces the film to its bestial sexual content. Still, there is something to be said for this film as a work of art. Setting aside, as people should, the sensationalist reaction, audiences seemed also to take issue with the storytelling. Many works this year were propelled by action, tension and topical subject matter. Much of what the Academy recognized are excellent examples of this (Get Out, Lady Bird and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri come to mind). However, The Shape of Water provides a more passive viewing experience through a tale that is driven more by detail than by plot.

The film follows Elisa Esposito, a mute custodian working at a top secret research facility in the outskirts of Baltimore. Her disability, paired with an innate curiosity and sexuality makes Elisa an unconventional figure of ‘innocence’. She is, as all other characters in the film from the sassy, righteous best friend to the villain partial to personal anecdotes, instantly familiar and serves to advance the plot rather than cultivate her own identity. To summarize briefly, the film accompanies Elisa through her life as a janitor, in search of some sense of completion in her bleak and harsh surroundings. When an humanoid lake creature is transported into the facility where she works, she finds herself swept up in an attempt to rescue it from harm, falling in love in process. Elisa is frail, dwarfed in both size and apparent personality by many of her peers. The beast requires such a patient personality, in the face of the laboratory’s horror. The story is essentially an adult Aesop’s fable, wrought with black and white morality and reckoning with nature, love and evil. 

In this light, the purpose of the movie is to explore the immersive and intricate potential of a predicable story. Whether or not you know each twist and turn, The Shape of Water is a recognizable ride, and indeed does not tend to engage many with its originality. The true magic of the film, which may well be incompatible with modern viewers, lies not in its originality nor in its complexity, but in its consistency. Guillermo Del Toro, the writer, director and true imaginative force behind the film, has produced a self-aware fairy tale that does not necessarily shy away from tropes than most postmodern films tend to do. With the stunning score of Alexandre Desplat and the distinctive editing throughout, the film foreshadows every major beat. The level of detail and production design is truly impeccable. One scene captures the sheer scale of a once-great, now decaying urban cinema. The next cleverly slips in a “Loose Lips Might Sink Ships” poster in the women’s locker room of the laboratory. The combined performances, sets, songs and scenes amount to piece that is not memorable nor distinctive for the story it tells, but for something otherwise absent in the medium today: The joy of a world fully understood.