THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017)

We sadly lost a full blog about The Shape of Water so please forgive us as we do a new one from scratch! I wanted to make sure we didn’t skip it completely though as it is one of my favorite Oscar winners. The film is a 2017 romantic fantasy written by Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor and directed by del Toro. It is set in Baltimore in 1962, and follows a character Elisa who cannot speak who falls in love with an amphibian-like creature in the high security lab where she works. A cleaner in the lab, Elisa’s world is very small and routine – her only friends are her neighbor Giles who is a closeted gay man and her Black co-worker Zelda. She witnesses the creature in her cleaning work and becomes fascinated with him. They develop a connection without language and a love beyond words.

Elisa herself is a person with mystery – she was discovered as a baby with wounds on her neck. She was found at the side of a river. She is mute and communicates through sign language. This is important and key to the story. 

I will definitely say, this is the best erotic love story about a human woman and magic fish monster I have ever seen. 

This is probably the first time a Best Picture has come up in our project that we had originally seen together during its theatrical run. Still, despite having seen it twice, I was still too dense to realize that the ending implies Elisa to be at least part fish-monster. 

I guess I am dense as well, because I also didn’t understand that until we read more later. I was, however, really fascinated by the whole Cold War element of the story. While fictional, I thought it stayed pretty true to a Baltimore in that time period vibe. Guillermo del Toro did such an aching, haunting, beautiful job with this film. The word that comes to mind is indelible; so many images from the film stayed with me for years to come.