A Definitive Del Toro Film. Review on The Shape of Water

The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. That applies to even the Amphibian Man in Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water", a movie set against the Cold War backdrop. The main events in this film take place somewhere in a US research center. The Americans conceive plans to send the Amphibian Man captured from the Amazon to space. The US is in a race against time to outwit the Russians in what is seemingly a Space Exploration camp. Somebody mentions Lenin, so this is certainly Cold War period.

Regardless, the movie happens to share a worldview of characters with deep prejudice, some with empathy and others with inertia like our Amphibian Man for instance. Unlike the superhero in DC Comics, this guy sporting a body-tight outfit mirrors an object of affection. One wonders how he even understands the sign language.

Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon) heads the facility, where Elisa (Sally Hawkins) and Delilah (Octavia Spencer) are working as janitors. Strickland tortures the Amphibian Man for sadistic pleasure, and Elisa comes to his rescue feeding him eggs. Eventually, a romantic relationship forms between Elisa and the man, Amazonians hail as god. She is mute, and one doubts if he even understands that.

Realizing Strickland’s torturing methods may even lead to his death, Elisa forms a counter plan to free the Amphibian Man. Then, a typical concentration camp like procedural ensues, where an Army chief sets off on a race against time to hunt down the two protagonists. That is one of the age old cliches of concentration camp movies.

One might be too old to quote Rick and Ilsa caught in a whirl wind of emotions in Casablanca. At one point in that 1942 film, Ilsa shows concern about the garrisson firing from outside and in the next, we see her in a moment of realization that world is not all that cynical if the lover is near.

The Shape of Water has a nihilistic villain, who goes all alone in pursuit of our protagonists. Michael Shannon plays Strickland as a megalomaniac, who leaves nothing to the imagination. He is the kind of man who eats candies while torturing people.

When “The Shape of Water” centers on our protagonists, we see Guillermo del Toro's imagination come to the fore. Watch those scenes in a water tank where the Amphibian Man hugs Elisa just as they get submerged underwater. Its one of the enduring images in this old-fashioned film with echoes of “Beauty and the Beast”. Only the beast happens to be Strickland in the truest sense of the word. Often he is the film’s inherent weakness, a cause of distraction and for reasons better left unsaid in the plot - evil personified. Shannon’s close up reminds us of an enraged Jack Nicholson.

After all, no Cold War film would be deemed complete without men like him. To give Guillermo del Toro credits where due, the movie does not use Strickland as a tool to manipulate a sense of care in the protagonists. As the man at the helm would have it, water has no definite shape and same holds true for romance. Sally Hawkins’s face mirrors compassion, while Del Toro’s voice is echoed through the Amphibian Man.