** No spoilers within this review **
Guillermo Del Toro's latest release, The Shape of Water, is a difficult creature to explain. Many times, while referencing friends and family to this film, I've had no clue how to put into words the utter enjoyment that one will feel while partaking in this little fantasy, crafted by the cunning and precise mind behind Pan's Labyrinth.
The most basic of explanations is this: Two broken souls find each other in the most peculiar of ways, strangled by a world that views them as lesser, struggling throughout this persecution to make a place for themselves where they can forget about their flaws and simply live in the happiness and contentment that they’ve found within each other.
A more blunt explanation would follow this path: A mute lady falls in love with a fish man. But underlying this most peculiar of settings is a motif of seclusion that many in our current world can identify with in a whole new way. This movie is an effort to give the unwhole and the broken a voice with which to speak. Not just as separated individuals with a chip on their shoulders, but as people, with a voice, the capacity to love, and and a story to tell.
The dinner table scene, while corny and unfounded in certain contexts, somehow fits seamlessly within the narrative of the story, and says more within it’s few minutes of running time about the feelings that two characters share for each other than many romances convey in the entirety of a film. This movie conveys emotions exceptionally well, inspiring true investment in characters that don’t speak at all throughout the running time of the film. It portrays the old film cliche of “show, don’t tell” in a multitude of imaginative ways.
As with any Del Toro film, this is a wonderfully shot piece, with sweeping wide angles that capture you in the whimsy and fantasy of it’s story with little to no effort. The practical effects are convincing and stunning in many places (hats off to Del Toro for sticking with his signature effects in a world with much simpler methods of creating the unreal, it really does make a difference)
This is a fairy tale in it's truest form, even if it's set in a more modern time with much more adult themes, and as such it requires some suspension of disbelief and childlike wonder to be viewed in its proper form, but the script, storyline and cinematography make that suspension nearly effortless, and the more cheesy storylines become integral to the experience this film conveys.
If you were a fan of Pan’s Labyrinth, if you enjoy creative storylines and cinematography, and if you’re in the mood for a touching story about whole love and the trials that less-than-whole people face in the quest to preserve it, this is the film for you.
