Review of The Shape of Water (2017) by Richard B — 29 Mar 2018

Hook, Line and Sinker.

Del Toro's unique Oscar winning tour de force confirms the Mexican as the greatest fantasy film maker alive. Visually sumptuous, the film boasts great performances throughout. The story is compelling and involving and deserves close attention.

On the surface, it is an unlikely love story between a deaf mute cleaning woman and a captured creature that lived in the Amazon - so much, so Creature of the Black Lagoon. What drives this film is hatred of men - misandry - and a rejection of the 'patriarchy' in no uncertain terms. Hence, it won Best Picture in the year of MeToo.

While this is involving it is also undermining. No heterosexual male character is remotely admirable - the Frankenstein lookalike Michael Shannon, who plays the creature's persecutor, the General, even the black cleaning woman's husband - all come in for narrative vitriol. The only male characters to be portrayed as humans are the gay artist neighbour (Jenkins) and the communist spy (Stuhlbarg). It is the women who are virtuous and triumphant - the mute cleaning woman (Hawkins), her buddy (Spencer), who conspire to save the creature from being murdered and cut up by setting him free to return to the sea.

So the fantasy is really similar to Pan's Labyrinth - a tale of misandry, in which the patriarchy surpasses women, gays and nature to control, dominate and even, kill it. It plays to the current feminist narrative with relish, the story turning ghoulish and bloody to make the points unmistakable.

It is stil a great film - original, brilliantly written, directed and performed. But what underlines the story cannot be glossed over or excused. It is a hate letter to the imagined patriarchy and to heterosexual men. Period.