Guillermo del Toros’s The Shape of Water is the latest meeting of the whimsical and the grotesque. The plot unfolds as follows: in the 1950s, Elisa is a cleaner at a military research laboratory, who happens also to be mute, which places her among other minorities without a say: there is her African-American colleague Zelda and her neighbour, the artist Giles, who is gay. The screenplay brings together the
disenfranchised to save a fellow outcast.
The amphibious monster kept captive at the lab doesn’t have a name, and his idea of a witty and humorous conversation is to roar in your face. But Elisa takes a shine to him. “When he looks at me, he doesn’t know what I lack or how I am incomplete.”
In this film watertight ideas fight for space with flawed ones. It begins with a dream sequence in which Elisa’s apartment is submerged. When the scene is repeated later for real, causing only a minor leak in the house below, the rational mind has too many objections (the floor would collapse!) for the fantasy to survive. An amphibious humanoid with magic powers we can believe, but a flooded apartment that is as good as new one scene later doesn’t stand up. There are other discrepancies too — like the sophisticated CCTV system in 1962, or the creature’s ability to wipe away the bulletholes in his own body, sealing up the wounds, ET-style.
Newstatesman, February 9th, 2018 (adapted)
