Every morning before sunrise, Elisa (Sally Hawkins) rises, fills her bathtub to the brim and immerses herself. She boils eggs and sets forth with her brown bag lunch for the bus stop. She’s a cleaning lady at a secretive military-industrial complex facility, swabbing the concrete floors with her mop. Water, the source of life, is prevalent throughout The Shape of Water. We even learn that Elisa was an orphan found abandoned by the river. And those eggs? That ancient symbol of life will also play its role in the story.
The latest film by writer-director Guillermo del Toro is a fairy tale set in early 1960s Baltimore and compounded from elements of ’50s sci-fi. The Shape of Water reimagines Creature from the Black Lagoon, a B-movie favorite about a man-sized amphibian from the Amazon Delta that walks erect but lives underwater. In The Shape of Water, the creature has been captured and brought to Elisa’s workplace, a bunker with sliding steel doors, guarded by helmeted MPs and staffed with technicians in neckties and white lab coats frowning over gauges and control panels.
The creature has potential value for the space program; its unique lungs could inspire breathing apparatus for astronauts. But Col. Strickland (Michael Shannon), the man responsible for “the Asset” as he terms the amphibian, hates the creature and wants it dead. The Soviets are also interested in the Asset, but if they can’t have him, they’d rather kill him than allow the Americans to learn his secrets.
Elisa discovers the creature chained to the bottom of a pool in the bunker. She has been nearly alone all her life; she is mute (her signing is subtitled) and reaches out to him. The creature is actually an actor (Doug Jones) in a beautiful morphing-colored rubber suit instead of the zero gravity computer imaging favored by many hack contemporary directors. He has fully expressive eyes; he’s dangerous but alluring. She feeds him eggs; she plays her Benny Goodman LP for him on a portable turntable. The creature responds.
In fairy tale terms, Elisa is Cinderella without siblings. Her fairy godfather lives down the hall in the apartments above a creaky old movie palace playing a Technicolor biblical epic, The Story of Ruth, whose strong female character is one of del Toro’s many mythic allusions. Giles (Richard Jenkins) is a failed commercial artist insulated by a wall of feigned indifference. When the TV news brings scenes of Alabama troopers attacking civil rights marchers, he changes channels to an old musical. But like Elisa, he’s an outcast—gay, aging and rejected. He decides to aid Elisa’s plan to rescue the creature (who might really be a prince—or something more?). They receive help from unexpected sources, Elisa’s coworker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and Dr. Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg). An idealistic scientist at Elisa’s facility, Hoffstetler is spying for the Soviets but goes rogue, concluding that the Bolshevik humanitarian rhetoric is a sham.
Col. Strickland is the story’s ogre. Like the Spanish fascist Capt. Vidal in del Toro’s unsettling Pan’s Labyrinth, Strickland is a local embodiment of pure evil. He is supercilious and arrogant in his American manifest destiny. He assumes racial superiority and the right to have his way with women. His super-patriotism is colored with an icky icing of evangelical religiosity. Strickland tortures the creature with a cattle prod.
Guillermo moves his story forward in swift strokes with all its darkness, suspense and humor, much of the latter from the dialogue between Elisa and Zelda. As Elisa, Hawkins conveys mute vulnerability as well as bravery as she overcomes fear at the fearsome sight of the creature. The Shape of Water becomes the struggle of outcasts against the hyper-real America inhabited by Strickland—a place of milkmen in starched white uniforms, shiny Cadillacs prowling beneath billboards touting bright green Jell-O and where suburban houses are tidy little boxes concealing horror.
