The Shape of Water

The Shape of Water should have been beautiful: Creature from the Black Lagoon with a successful romantic ending. Sally Hawkins is indeed luminous playing a mute woman who feels herself an incomplete being, as much a freak as the ichthyic “asset” acquired by a military research laboratory, stolen from its home in a South American river where it was worshipped as a god. Octavia Spencer is warm and dignified and strong as the heroine’s friend. Her smile of willing shock and delight when Elisa reveals her liason with the creature is one of the best moments of a film full of many such moments. The main villain of the piece is, however, so darkly unredeemably evil under his perfect sixties veneer as to skew the balance, and the movie has all of writer-director Guillermo del Toro’s trademark fixation with puncture wounds and dismemberments. The harshest moment is the torture and execution of the sympathetic Russian mole whose poet-scientist’s soul responding to the creature’s nature rebels at capturing or killing it for his masters. The first two-thirds of the movie are absorbing despite a few over-the-top choices; the last third is a dark and ugly chase sequence. The ending is as expected for a del Toro story but the preceding nastiness robs it of the proper catharsis of a fairy tale.