Review: "The Shape Of Water"

Del Toro, Guillermo (Dir.), “The Shape of Water”, Bull Productions/Double Dare You/Fox Searchlight, 2017.

Here’s a question: say you’re on the production team of Universal’s “Dark Universe” project, wrestling with the critical non-acclaim of its first turkey – the Tom Cruise-led ‘un-make’ of “The Mummy” – when an Oscar-winning independent director films a re-boot of “Creature From The Black Lagoon” that’s far better than anything your team could come up with and which is completely outside of your ambit – what do you do? Well, since Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” is already on-track for Academy Awards success, I guess all you can reasonably do is wring your hands, quietly shelve the whole “Dark Universe” mess and hope that no-one remembers what you were up to.

Del Toro has been a little off track of late. “Crimson Peak” – while visually stunning – was a disorganised mess, and the TV series “The Strain” was more than a little patchy. Even “Pacific Rim” had some troubles. I put a lot of this down to the frustrations of being involved with the whole “Hobbit” fiasco, which must have been distracting at best. Now, however, it’s clear that time away from these lesser vehicles has given del Toro a chance to re-set and to focus on what he does best.

There are a lot of parallels between this film and “Pan’s Labyrinth” – an ingénue encountering fantastic elements in the face of a repressive regime. In this story, a mute cleaner at a Top Secret research facility in the 1960s discovers a ‘fish man’ being studied there and decides to release it before it is killed and anatomised. This contest of pure and determined innocence against dark and vested forces is a hallmark of del Toro’s best films, notably “Cronos” and “Pan’s Labyrinth”. The setting allows for much playfulness in terms of design and the wonderful soundtrack, but it isn’t a random or whimsical choice: the 60s was a period of gloss and glamour, but it was also a time of conformity and repression where socially unacceptable elements were swept violently beneath a Hugo Gernsback-styled veneer. In this tale, the baddies are the ones with slick hair-dos, shiny cars and magazine-curated homes and families. In this sense, del Toro is commenting quite a bit about the world of today.

Many of the traditional del Toro touches appear throughout this film. Shoes – and shoebrushes – are a feature, as are cats; there is a signature colour throughout (green this time); and a distressing hand injury takes centre stage (hearkening back to “Pan’s Labyrinth” once more). And the ubiquitous Doug Jones is here as well. In fact, knowing that he was going to be playing the creature in this film, I had a few qualms going in:

Many actors, over time, develop a unique ‘tool-kit’ of tics and flourishes that cover most situations in which they find themselves. For this reason, I can’t watch Meryl Streep anymore. In the course of her career, she seems to have become a caricature of herself on screen, where once, in her earliest film appearances, she was daring and kinetic. Robert de Niro also has this effect on me. Doug Jones, no matter how many layers of latex he’s covered with, is almost always recognisable. I was worried that this role would be another Abe Sapien re-hash from “Hell-Boy”, but I was more than pleasantly surprised. As “the Asset” in this movie, he plays it low-key, abandoning all of the quirky C3-PO head jerks and shoulder twitches, and focuses not only on portraying his character, but also the interconnectedness of the two lovers at the heart of the story. I was very impressed.

But it’s not just the main characters who get all of the attention. Like most of del Toro’s films, each character on screen gets moments to shine, no matter how small their contribution. Here, the second-string and background characters are as luminous as the leads. The bitchy queue-jumper hating Yolanda is great; the lugubrious theatre owner downstairs who thinks ‘Mardi Gras’ is spelt ‘Mardi Grass’; the incompetent Russian spy ‘nyetwork’: they all serve the story brilliantly. It’s part of what makes a del Toro film a rich and varied tapestry.

If I have a beef with this film at all, it’s to do with the language. Here, I’m talking about the four-letter word kind of language, rather than the prevailing idiom. There are some scenes here, of such finely-constructed beauty, that get trampled by an overuse of the F-word, and also some scenes of menace and threat that lose energy by being verbalised with the same excess. They’re called “F-bombs” for a reason – they’re loud, distracting and destructive. Less is more.

Before I conclude, I have to take a moment to mention the soundtrack. There are few films that I go to where the music is not just some background orchestral thing that underscores the action. “The Illusionist”, the soundtrack of which was written by Philip Glass, almost overtook the visuals in that film – it was the first movie, I think, where I shut my eyes and listened rather than watched. This film was similar. The soundtrack is circuitous and almost tangential, coming out of various 60s pastiche moments and doing its job wonderfully as well as subtly. It’s noticeable but not demanding of your attention; it serves the movie while being utterly unique, rich and captivating.

If you’ve never seen “Creature From The Black Lagoon”, you should really try to before seeing this film. Of the Universal monsters series, it’s one of my favourites simply because the visuals – especially the underwater sequences – strive to rise above the B-movie cheesiness of the concept and attain something greater. I think that is what has inspired del Toro here – the notion that a piece of genre storytelling can talk to wider and higher concepts than its ostensible basis would intimate. Watch both of these films before the "Dark Universe" puts its grubby mitts all over the concept - you can't go wrong.

Four-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors from me.