Review of The Shape of Water (2017) by Filmlover83 — 12 Jan 2018

I adore fantasy, monster movies, unusual and different stories. I HATED this movie. I created this account to review this movie. In 'Splash' Tom Hanks - your everyman guy gets the stunning mermaid. It's cute, fun and doesn't take itself too seriously. In this film, the ordinary girl gets a slimy cat-eating creature from the Black Lagoon (or rather, he gets her) and it takes itself very seriously in some artsy intensely annoying self-indulgent way which absolutely misses the mark. Guillermo del Toro pounds us over the head with his water theme (we get it already) and creates a female lead without understanding anything about women. She's childlike and annoying as hell, skipping down the corridor like a giddy child, implausibly falling for a monster not long after mopping up blood after he bites off and spits out human fingers (their 'falling in love' montage *could* possibly have been made believable, but absolutely was not), masturbating in the bath every morning (sorry guys - sure women masturbate, but not in the bath to an egg timer - del Toro put this in to heavy-handedly enforce his water theme and that's absolutely how it came across. She can do NOTHING without the help of every male character around her and is quite pathetic when she *could* have had an arc (the shy cleaner falls in love and rises in confidence, orchestrating and pulling off a rescue mission. But oh no, childlike and helpless she achieves nothing and the men around her have to save her mission at every turn). The film plods on forever with a second and third act that left me squirming in my seat and desperate to leave and finally ends anti-climatically and predictably. It didn't surprise me when Guillermo del Toro came out afterwards (this was an industry screening) and talked for 2 hours about his masterpiece and how profound it was, and how he dreamt it up as a child, because every boy without a girlfriend wants to imagine that even if he as an ugly amphibious monster, he could still score sex with a willing female with a size zero figure. Whatever!! It felt like sexist tripe from a self-indulgent man with no clue about women.

One of the worst films I have ever seen, made so much worse by how much it takes itself seriously. Classic Emperor's New Clothes situation here.