100 Movies in 2020: #17, The Shape of Water
Like a painting, The Shape of Water is visually arresting. It’s also difficult to articulate what makes the film to compelling. Those are the facts about this magical, elusive, unforgettable film that I can wrap my hands around.
- Release: 2017
- Starring: Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Octavia Spencer, Doug Jones.
- Directed by: Guillermo del Toro
- Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro, Vanessa Taylor
In this “poetic love letter to misunderstood creatures,” a mute woman falls in love with a mysterious merman / sea creature being held in the top secret government lab where she works as a cleaner.
I’m not familiar with most Guillermo DelToro’s oeuvre, but magical realism is apparently a recurring theme in his work. It’s hard to think about anything else in this film.
It’s both a haunting fairy tale and a mystical love story. This is going to sound somewhere between weird and obvious, but visually speaking, the film has a kind of luminous-yet-watery quality to it (mission accomplished?). It reminds me of the Edward Hopper painting Nighthawks come to life, but crossed with the surrealism of Rene Magritte and the sensuousness of Georgia O’Keefe. The action of the film takes place mostly at night, when Elisa and Zelda come in to do the cleaning, and consequently the film’s lighting conveys a sense of darkness, obscurity, and secrecy.
I take comfort in seeing that many other reviews have a hard time qualifying this story. They seem to land on the consensus opinion, “It’s weird but it works.” Add my vote to that tally. How do you describe magic, anyway?
Isolation
The film deals with themes of loneliness and isolation. Elisa (Sally Hawkins), being mute, obviously endures a measure of distance between herself and anyone she encounters. The merman couldn’t be more isolated; he’s held in a solitary tank far away from the Amazon, where he was captured. Giles, Elisa’s friend, suffers the loneliness of being a gay man in in the 1960s. Her best friend Zelda, though married, lives the isolated life of an African-American woman in the Jim Crow era. A Soviet spy in the lab suffers the isolation and pressure of having to conceal his identity, and also of having to argue his objective and tactics with his handlers. Strickland’s cruelty keeps everyone around him at bay.
The film renders this isolation visually through its noir-ish, dark coloring. The presence of water everywhere–in the bathroom, the lab, the rain-washed windows–feels like a veil through which we perceive the action. And yet in the love story there’s a coziness that breaks through, like the red pops of color in Elisa’s coat and shoes. Del Toro was going for magic, and he got it.
Writing lesson from The Shape of Water
Make your work visually arresting.
Make your work visually arresting. Consider finding a piece of artwork to inspire its tone. Infuse it with a mood and paint an unforgettable picture.
Additional reading
- How The Shape of Water’s visual effects turned a merman into a romantic lead
- Inside Guillermo del Toro’s ‘The Shape of Water’ Fantastical Production Design: Oscars 2018
- The Delightful Design Details in Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water
- ‘The Shape of Water’: Guillermo Del Toro Takes You Inside the Best-Designed Film of 2017
