The movie is carefully designed to take place within the period, but also have a surreal quality to it with its costumes and sets splashed in a sea-foam green color tone. As Strickland becomes more hostile towards the creature, Elisa decides to recruit the help of Giles and her friend and co-worker Zelda ( Octavia Spencer, as charming as ever) to help her break him out of the facility.ĭel Toro is one of the finest visual filmmakers working today and The Shape of Water is a perfect example of that. Robert Hoffstetler ( Michael Stuhlbarg, he’s having a great year between this and Call Me By Your Name), who might have ulterior motives for the creature. She begins to see the humanity in him, as does Dr. Over time, the creature and Elisa begin to bond. As time goes on, Elisa begins sneaking into the room that contains the creature to feed him hard-boiled eggs and play him music off her portable record player. What is clear is that Elisa is taken aback by him, especially when the head of the team researching the creature, Colonel Richard Strickland ( Michael Shannon), is injured by him.

He is simply referred to as Amphibious Man ( Doug Jones) in the credits, but that doesn’t quite cover what he is. This asset is a mysterious creature that was found in the waters of South America. Elisa is also special because she works nights cleaning at the Occam Aerospace Research Center, a top-secret government facility that recently acquired an asset that they believe may be the key to besting Russia at the space race. She’s a lively woman who enjoys conversation with her neighbor Giles, an advertisement artist who has let go from his company because of some type of addiction that we don’t quite learn of. But she doesn’t let that fact crush her spirit. However, Elisa isn’t exactly a normal woman. When she wakes she changes over the calendar, puts eggs on the stove to boil, makes her lunch for the day, and of course masturbates in the bath.

In early 1960s Baltimore, Elisa Esposito ( Sally Hawkins) lives a routine life. But that isn’t anything new for Del Toro. However, like a fairy tale, his delivery of this message is a bit on the nose.

There are even moments where it seems like the image on screen could be a page in a picture book. Like his last film Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water is presented as a fairy tale and is stylistically told as such. That’s the message that Guierrmo Del Toro seems to be trying to get across with his newest movie The Shape of Water, a modern fantasy romance during the height of the Cold War. Love is love, even if it’s between a human woman and an amphibian man.

The Shape of Water is a beautifully crafted story by master filmmaker Guierrmo Del Toro, but lacks the emotional depth to make it great.

Doug jones the shape of water