Film: The Shape of Water is a charming Cold War parable

The Shape of Water

Directed by Guillermo del Toro

Starring Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins

Guillermo del Toro makes adult fantasy-parable movies, most notably the Spanish-language Pan’s Labrynth (2006), a mystical, dreamy movie about a faun and a woman, all set amidst the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. In some ways, the just-released The Shape of Water is a US version in the same vein. In this film, del Toro sets a “Beauty and the Beast” film in an analogously grim period of US history—the paranoid, McCarthy 1950’s. Unlike the dreamy landscape of the earlier film, this one is all grit and technology gone wrong: the setting is largely an enormous cement bunker in which the CIA performs scientific experiments driven by competition with the Soviet Union, and where Soviet spies are a constant presence. Where the earlier film sought to distinguish a colorful, dreamy fantasy labyrinth with the horrors of war outside, this film is much darker, immersing us in the paranoid landscape of its time, enhanced by the juicily sociopathic Michael Shannon as a hyperpatriotic, evil CIA agent. The movie deals with the fate of an amphibious human-sized creature taken by the CIA from the Amazon waters and experimented upon with the goal of creating a super-weapon for use in the Cold War. The “good guys” here are some cleaning ladies who sympathize with the creature’s plight and seek to liberate him from the evil scientists. In setting up this fantasy, del Toro successfully covers some major themes of American dysfunction: race, sexism, class, the role of science and technology in society, the role of the military. But he also makes a very old fashioned American movie in which the little guy (here the cleaning lady who falls for the beast, a quirky and natural Sally Hawkins) seeks to defeat the CIA machine.

Stylistically, If La La Land was a salute to 1950’s musicals, The Shape of Water is a salute to the classic 1950’s horror films like The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Godzilla, which played on society’s suppressed fears about nuclear war and the mutation of nature. Those films were black and white in an era of technicolor, and their gritty darkness depicted the threatening underbelly of the burgeoning technology and massive cement construction in urban 1950s America. This film makes that even more explicit, placing the natural creature in a terrifying, grey, massive concrete science bunker reminiscent of the nuclear bunkers for NORAD seen in movies like War Games (1983). 

Color is critical to this film. When the creature is in his natural environment, brilliant blues contrast with the oppressive greys and muted tones of the science bunker. And passion is given a brightly lit contrasting special effect that contrasts with the otherwise-darkly lit set. Del Toro has a strong artistic sense of using film technique to achieve emotion, and uses a wide palette of creative techniques in doing so. The creature itself is a masterpiece of construction and motion.

Thus, while The Shape of Water is an essentially conservative film that honors past forms and US filmmaking traditions, its very peculiar mix and alternating humor, romance, and blackness place it in the European tradition. This complex mixture could very easily have gone wrong, but del Toro’s mastery and control of pace and style keeps it all unified, logical (for a fantasy), and constantly forward-moving. Somehow, his addition of visual style and European emotional complexity to what is essentially an old-style American monster chase-rescue film makes the whole thing work marvelously. This is not a film that makes one think or reflect much: the environmental and anti-military themes are always in the background, not trumpeted in your face. But this makes the film very generalizable to many audiences, and I can imagine it being appreciated by children, adults, and devotees of adventure, horror, or European art movies. This makes it a wonderful film for the holidays, despite its dark setting and political sensibilities.