If you're different from everyone else, sometimes they fear you. It's worse if they can't understand you. If you're lucky, they dismiss you. If not, then they may call you a monster. But what if those who are different are actually the lucky ones? What if two "monsters" in an uncaring world actually find one another? What if they find a connection?
Guillermo del Toro has long been one of our best filmmakers, and a visionary for whom monsters resonate like nobody else. He's had an incredible career, but with The Shape of Water, del Toro's done something new and moving and given us one his absolute best films. A lush, romantic love story that springs out of the confines of the late-fifties government-labs-gone-wrong pictures he grew up with, rather than have "the creature" break loose of his shackles and go on a killing spree, del Toro let's this monster fall in love.
It's 1962 and as the Cuban Missile Crisis escalates, Elisa Esposito (Blue Jasmine's Sally Hawkins) is a cleaning woman at one of those secret experimental installations - somebody's got to mop up the blood when something goes wrong inside the lab. Because Elisa can't speak - she's been mute since birth - her existence is barely even acknowledged by the lab coats and soldiers scurrying about their business. Her best work friend Zelda is a similar outcast - because she's black. The always superb Octavia Spencer is only too happy to fill the void left by Elisa's silence and does plenty of talking for both of them. Zelda understands Elisa, and so do we. Elisa's use of sign language is punctuated by vivid subtitles that let us keep up with the confidences she shares with Zelda, but Sally Hawkins'
performance here is on its own transcendent, ethereal level. At times it borders on the expressiveness of dance. Never once do we have any doubt about how Elisa's feeling - her face - those eyes - we're with her every step of the way - from her enjoyable visits with her gay neighbor - another outcast (given the time), played by the wonderful Richard Jenkins, to her moments of intimate solitude . Jenkins' Giles, Zelda, and Elisa are all outsiders of one stripe or another - being gay or black in 1962 both held their own potential perils. For Elisa, because she's so easily dismissed, is able to move and explore with the freedom that comes with invisibility - and it isn't long before her curiosity draws her to "The Asset," the thing in the lab, an amphibious being exploited for its cold war space-race potential against the Russians - a webbed captive (Doug Jones) who evokes both del Toro's own Abe Sapien (Hellboy) and the gill-man from the great 1954 Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Elisa and "The Asset" are drawn to one another, and it isn't long before she's sneaking in to bring him food (hard-boiled eggs) and a portable record player to share her favorite music. The Shape of Water does a potent job of showing us that love lives outside of normalcy and convention, its power surpasses speech or surface physical differences. And when love that deep is threatened, you'll do anything you can to save it.
As the starch-shirt straight-arrow running things, Michael Shannon's Richard Strickland is an incredible character to behold. Shannon's played a wide range of villains (Man of Steel), but I've never seen him go where he did here. A slithery, obsessive Don Draper, when he's not torturing his captive, he's ruling the facility from a place of genuine fear - it's all he knows, and so it's his first and only response to others. Don't dismiss this as a stock bad guy role, Shannon's work here - like everyone else in this stellar cast - is simply incomparable. A scene at the urinal with Elisa and Zelda looking on is one of the best scenes you'll find this year.
Doug Jones has made an impressive career inhabiting strange otherworldly beings (in addition to Abe Sapien, he was both the Faun and the Pale Man in del Toro's own Pan's Labyrinth), and his physicality here and ability to express emotion through movement is phenomenal. They will be studying the use of color in The Shape of Water for years to come. The cinematography by the great Dan Lausten (Crimson Peak, Solomon Kane, Brotherhood of the Wolf) is rich and uses hues of green (and teal...!) to beautiful, subtle effect, marrying colors with emotions. It feels like he and del Toro must have enthusiastically traded notes on hundreds of late-fifties romance pictures, as there are so many little visual grace notes it became impossible to even begin to keep track of them.
Del Toro's range is humbling. After seeing him run amok with the giant kaiju/mecha sandwich of Pacific Rim, The Shape of Water is such an intimate, emotional story on so many levels, it's just remarkable to see a director who can move so...fluidly from one end of that scale to the other. He orchestrates jaw-dropping performances from every actor in this film - all clearly having the time of their lives - while conjuring a visual feast of pure cinema that spans fifty years of visual storytelling, resulting in a tale of pure suspense, poetry and love, that feels fresh and timeless all at once.
The Shape of Water is without a doubt one of the best two or three films of the year, and I can't wait to dive in again and savor even more. It's a story of mythic love, maybe even destiny. If your heart is still beating, and if you've ever felt even just the littlest bit different, miss this one at your peril. Highest possible recommendation. Cinema at its finest.
Guillermo del Toro has long been one of our best filmmakers, and a visionary for whom monsters resonate like nobody else. He's had an incredible career, but with The Shape of Water, del Toro's done something new and moving and given us one his absolute best films. A lush, romantic love story that springs out of the confines of the late-fifties government-labs-gone-wrong pictures he grew up with, rather than have "the creature" break loose of his shackles and go on a killing spree, del Toro let's this monster fall in love.
It's 1962 and as the Cuban Missile Crisis escalates, Elisa Esposito (Blue Jasmine's Sally Hawkins) is a cleaning woman at one of those secret experimental installations - somebody's got to mop up the blood when something goes wrong inside the lab. Because Elisa can't speak - she's been mute since birth - her existence is barely even acknowledged by the lab coats and soldiers scurrying about their business. Her best work friend Zelda is a similar outcast - because she's black. The always superb Octavia Spencer is only too happy to fill the void left by Elisa's silence and does plenty of talking for both of them. Zelda understands Elisa, and so do we. Elisa's use of sign language is punctuated by vivid subtitles that let us keep up with the confidences she shares with Zelda, but Sally Hawkins'
performance here is on its own transcendent, ethereal level. At times it borders on the expressiveness of dance. Never once do we have any doubt about how Elisa's feeling - her face - those eyes - we're with her every step of the way - from her enjoyable visits with her gay neighbor - another outcast (given the time), played by the wonderful Richard Jenkins, to her moments of intimate solitude . Jenkins' Giles, Zelda, and Elisa are all outsiders of one stripe or another - being gay or black in 1962 both held their own potential perils. For Elisa, because she's so easily dismissed, is able to move and explore with the freedom that comes with invisibility - and it isn't long before her curiosity draws her to "The Asset," the thing in the lab, an amphibious being exploited for its cold war space-race potential against the Russians - a webbed captive (Doug Jones) who evokes both del Toro's own Abe Sapien (Hellboy) and the gill-man from the great 1954 Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Elisa and "The Asset" are drawn to one another, and it isn't long before she's sneaking in to bring him food (hard-boiled eggs) and a portable record player to share her favorite music. The Shape of Water does a potent job of showing us that love lives outside of normalcy and convention, its power surpasses speech or surface physical differences. And when love that deep is threatened, you'll do anything you can to save it.
As the starch-shirt straight-arrow running things, Michael Shannon's Richard Strickland is an incredible character to behold. Shannon's played a wide range of villains (Man of Steel), but I've never seen him go where he did here. A slithery, obsessive Don Draper, when he's not torturing his captive, he's ruling the facility from a place of genuine fear - it's all he knows, and so it's his first and only response to others. Don't dismiss this as a stock bad guy role, Shannon's work here - like everyone else in this stellar cast - is simply incomparable. A scene at the urinal with Elisa and Zelda looking on is one of the best scenes you'll find this year.
Doug Jones has made an impressive career inhabiting strange otherworldly beings (in addition to Abe Sapien, he was both the Faun and the Pale Man in del Toro's own Pan's Labyrinth), and his physicality here and ability to express emotion through movement is phenomenal. They will be studying the use of color in The Shape of Water for years to come. The cinematography by the great Dan Lausten (Crimson Peak, Solomon Kane, Brotherhood of the Wolf) is rich and uses hues of green (and teal...!) to beautiful, subtle effect, marrying colors with emotions. It feels like he and del Toro must have enthusiastically traded notes on hundreds of late-fifties romance pictures, as there are so many little visual grace notes it became impossible to even begin to keep track of them.
Del Toro's range is humbling. After seeing him run amok with the giant kaiju/mecha sandwich of Pacific Rim, The Shape of Water is such an intimate, emotional story on so many levels, it's just remarkable to see a director who can move so...fluidly from one end of that scale to the other. He orchestrates jaw-dropping performances from every actor in this film - all clearly having the time of their lives - while conjuring a visual feast of pure cinema that spans fifty years of visual storytelling, resulting in a tale of pure suspense, poetry and love, that feels fresh and timeless all at once.
The Shape of Water is without a doubt one of the best two or three films of the year, and I can't wait to dive in again and savor even more. It's a story of mythic love, maybe even destiny. If your heart is still beating, and if you've ever felt even just the littlest bit different, miss this one at your peril. Highest possible recommendation. Cinema at its finest.
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