What a year for horror. First we got Get Out, and since then at least three major Stephen King adaptations, two space-traveling alien flicks, new Annabelle and Insidious installments, Aronofsky's psychological bloodbath mother!, the severely underrated Happy Death Day, and now this. That's not all of them, of course, but enough to show the broad range and scope of the genre this year and to show that at least three are what some are considering high art. Three. Get Out, mother!, and The Shape of Water each transcend the genre in ways I've certainly not seen recently, if at all, in mainstream movies. Get Out, though people will insist is essentially a comedy, and mother!, which nobody really can label, were perhaps more extreme in their violent disruption of normative culture. But The Shape of Water, for all its beauty, is no less brutal in its explicit horror elements nor in its good old-fashioned monstrosity.
The plot is largely uninteresting. Elisa, a mute custodian (an astounding Sally Hawkins) working at a high-security American laboratory during the Cold War, discovers and befriends a monster (Doug Jones). As they embark on a romantic journey together, they must fight the forces that seek to destroy them, namely the cruel colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon). That's it. The crux of the thing. A sort of typical tale told with a few alterations -- I'll never really be okay with the fish-man sex scenes -- it reads as a dark fantasy, a Gothic monster movie not wholly unlike Whale's Frankenstein or a leering Lon Chaney silent film.
Of course, that's where things get really interesting. After reading an interview with director and writer Guillermo del Toro, I learned his love affair with the 1954 Creature from the Black Lagoon served as his impetus for this movie. Of course it was. It's impossible to watch The Shape of Water and not see Gill-man in half the scenes. What's interesting, though, is that del Toro wanted to see what happens when the monster and the damsel consummate their affections. That's the great tragedy of Black Lagoon, isn't it? Miscegenation (and inter-species romance) and female agency, etc., is doomed by the white men with guns, etc., seeking to exploit and control nature, etc.
The Shape of Water, though, is also surprisingly timely. It's a love letter to horror, to be sure, but also to the freak show America that is under assault right now. The movie carries intense environmental overtures. Our heroine and romantic star is a woman who has incredible agency, and is also disabled, rendered mute. Her best friends are another black woman (Octavia Spencer) and a closeted gay man (Richard Jenkins). Together, and with the help of a Soviet spy (Michael Stuhlbarg), they escape the laboratory to set the monster --and themselves, I might add -- free. What here isn't spitting in the face of the Trump administration?
It's also, as ever, an uncommonly beautiful movie. Impressionistic and evocative, del Toro crafts yet another dark fantasy of haunting imagery. His lighting and special effects meld into the real world so seamlessly that we are transported to a magical hyper-reality. We know exactly what's happening, if not always how we should feel about it. Even the opening scene, in which Elisa dreams of her flooded apartment in contented peace, reveals a poetic power in del Toro's fantasy beyond most filmmakers right now. Each shot could be framed and mounted in a gallery. The music is pitch-perfect, both Alexandre Desplat's score and the more familiar period tunes.
Gorgeous and chilling, violent and funny, heartwarming and deeply disturbing, The Shape of Things reminds us that romance is always present in horror, and that horror is always present in romance.
IMDb: The Shape of Water
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