Review of The Shape of Water (2017) by Realmuthaf — 11 Mar 2018

To be honest, the whole premise of a love story between a woman and some weird merman seemed unattractive to me to begin with, but the Oscars did their advertising job in the end. And my intuition did not fail, Shape of Water is boring, weird, and overly-sweet all at the same time.

To start with the good things - visually it's well-filmed and the 60's are stylishly presented. It's nothing ground-breaking, but overall solid. The second good aspect are the actors, everyone plays their roles convincingly. I would point out Michael Shannon in particular, he proved that he can be a great antagonist before, and he's done it again, I was actually rooting for his character throughout.

However, the story is a dull bizarre mess. To begin with, it is overwhelmingly unoriginal - the sheepish sugar-sweet lonely protagonist, the captive creature that is tortured instead of being communicated with, the army man antagonist. The movie is just a drag, and everything is as predictable as it can be.

Now I can buy the ancient overused trope about the protagonist empathizing to some captive intelligent creature, but explicitly having sex with it? And yeah, there's actually plenty of unnecessary nudity (Shannon shags his wife. Ok.) and allusions to the creature's penis. Well, whatever gets you that Oscar, I guess. I mean I'm no prune, but in my opinion nudity is justified when it helps to convey some point and flesh out the story. But this, this just looks like Del Toro's sick creepy sexual fantasies brought to life. Sorry, but my suspension of disbelief just doesn't cover the "woman gets turned on by slippery scaly aquatic monster" thing. What's your next move, Del Toro, a movie about furries?

To add to that, there's an absolutely redundant meaningless side plot about a gay old man failing to hook up with another guy, and couple of scenes dedicated to showing that Shannon's character has a sexual fetish for silence. That's when you thought this movie couldn' get any more creepy.

And since we're at it, I would really question how realistic it is that some random cleaners are allowed access to classified assets in a top-secret research facility. There's also an uncomfortably stereotypical black woman who overcompensates for the muteness of the main character, never managing to finally shut the hell up. Also at one point the movie has a musical number in it, like in some Disney flick. That was also the moment when my facepalm intensity peaked. Yeah, and isn't this merman's design very reminiscent of some sidekick of Hellboy in Del Toro's own movie? Pathetic.

So, as they say, best movie my ass. I've recently also watched "Three Billboards...", and it's miles ahead than this trash.