1 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
4 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
7 Giles, who is gay. The screenplay brings together the
disenfranchised to save a fellow outcast.
The amphibious monster kept captive at the lab
10 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
13 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
16 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 !) for
19 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
22 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)
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