The Shape of Water is a deep dive into a dream state, like a two-hour episode of The Twilight Zone written by Puccini. She alone makes the discovery that it can communicate, and slowly but surely the two fall in love. Elisa conceives a fascination for the creature, and plays it music late at night when everyone else in the lab has gone home. In charge of this creature is a buttoned-up apparatchik and all-round sexist, racist creep called Strickland (a somewhat familiar role for Michael Shannon), and a sensitive scientist, Dr Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg). The two swab and mop their way around endless underground corridors, labs and men’s lavatories, and witness the facility’s extraordinary top-secret acquisition: an amphibious creature, half-man, half-lizard, which the top brass have shipped over from Brazil and intend to use for sinister experimental purposes. At work, Elisa’s best friend is Zelda (an exuberant performance from Octavia Spencer). The homophobia of the era has forced him into the closet and turned him into a melancholy, professionally frustrated alcoholic. The period detail is eerily rendered, but this is a knight’s-move away from the real world, more like 1963 Baltimore on a twin planet Earth on the other side of the galaxy.Įlisa shares her apartment with Giles (Richard Jenkins) a commercial artist and a gentle, shy, gay man. It is the beginning of the space race and the cold war, with bigotry and conformism all around. The date would appear to be 1963 – one character talks about the battle of Pusan of 1950 being 13 years ago, and Kennedy’s voice is audible on the radio at one stage. Sally Hawkins gives a career-best performance with her sly, sensual, vulnerable portrayal of Elisa, a mute woman employed as a cleaner in a military research facility in Baltimore. Photograph: Allstar/Fox Searchlight Pictures Sworn to secrecy … Sally Hawkins and Octavia Spencer in The Shape of Water.

The shape of water guillermo del toro