It is with great disappointment that I admit I felt nothing while watching director Guillermo del Toro's latest fairy tale-horror-drama, The Shape of Water. I'm a big fan of del Toro's and have always admired him, so I was inclined to root for this movie. I didn't fight its romantic sentiments or its old Hollywood adoration; I wanted to surrender to its fantasy. There just wasn't much there.
Set at the height of the Cold War, American intelligence is aggressively looking for ways to achieve world domination. Eliza, a mute cleaning woman working at a top secret government facility, stumbles across a supernatural fish-man captured from the Amazon. She begins to develop feelings for the creature and, with the help of a few friends, sets out to save him from the evil clutches of the government.
The movie has recently been distilled to "the fish sex" movie; and this is not inaccurate. At its core, its a romance between a woman, who herself feels incomplete, and a mutant fish man, an outsider in our world. But to reduce the movie to a snarky bestiality joke both discounts the movie's beauty - del Toro's prudent use of colors, the accessibility of Sally Hawkins' performance, the incredible design of the fish costume - and reveals its glaring fault: its parts do not add up to its whole. Individually, components of the movie are obviously crafted with care and attention. It's all very lovely. But they are in service of a story that is both too complacent and too simple to generate any real emotion.
I thought about del Toro's other movies. One of my personal favorites, Blade II is no masterpiece but it has moments of genuine horror and unforgettable creature design. The same could be said of his two Hellboy movies - they're obviously crafted with a great attention to detail and a loving hand. And they offer real moments of depth and wonder. I would even argue that Pacific Rim, seemingly the big, vacant robot action movie a la Transformers, conjured moments of emotional connection and pure, giddy fun.
But those are all movies of a lower tier; The Shape of Water is meant to be a, ahem, "film." Perhaps the best comparison then, is del Toro's own Pan's Labyrinth. An echo in some ways, both Pan's Labyrinth and The Shape of Water tell the story of a lost princess seeking purpose in a cruel world. But where Pan's Labyrinth's myth is tragic and allegorical, The Shape of Water is all too neat and tidy. It's a world populated by archetypes that never transcend their headline descriptor: a poor mute woman, her poor gay neighbor, her unappreciated black co-worker, a so-called freak of nature, all battling the cruelty of a God-and-country white man. When the deck is this stacked, there are no surprises left to discover, no deeper subtext to unravel.
Simplicity is good; and simplicity done well is rare. But The Shape of Water has lost sight of the forest for the trees. It's created something no one will hate; but worse, it's reduced its characters to the point of caricature, its story to mockery. Is it the Oscar winner for Best Picture? Nah. It's just the fish sex movie.
