Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, premiering in Competition in Venice and screening as a Special Presentation in Toronto, is a “ravishing, eccentric auteur’s imagining, spilling artistry, empathy and sensuality from every open pore, [offering] more straight-up movie for your money than just about any Hollywood studio offering this year,” writes Variety’s Guy Lodge. “This decidedly adult fairytale, about a forlorn, mute cleaning lady and the uncanny merman who save each other’s lives in very different ways, careers wildly from mad-scientist B-movie to heart-thumping Cold War noir to ecstatic, wings-on-heels musical, keeping an unexpectedly classical love story afloat with every dizzy genre turn. Lit from within by a heart-clutching silent star turn from Sally Hawkins, lent dialogue by one of Alexandre Desplat’s most abundantly swirling scores, this is incontestably Del Toro’s most rewarding, richly realized film—or movie, for that matter—since 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth.”
“It feels less of a fevered artistic exercise than his other recent work,” finds the Guardian’s Xan Brooks, “more seamless and successful in the way it orders its material. Yes, Del Toro’s latest flight of fancy sets out to liberally pastiche the postwar monster movie, doffing its cap to the incident at Roswell and all manner of related cold war paranoia. But it’s warmer and richer than the films that came before. Beneath that glossy, scaly surface is a beating heart.”
“There is unmistakable, idiosyncratic care poured into every frame of The Shape of Water, saturated with del Toro’s offbeat compassion and looping, pattern-recognition intelligence,” writes Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “[M]otifs recur and DP Dan Laustsen’s striking images often refer back to earlier shots, with an insouciant, incidental ease that could only feel so effortless in such a meticulously considered world.”
“The era in which Water is set—Cold War 1960s—informs the aesthetic, but the director and designer Paul Austerberry have couched it in a baroque-colored, industrial-like setting, a dripping netherworld, a fairytale land existing within that time zone yet eternal,” adds Screen’s Fionnuala Halligan.
“The bright-eyed heroine of the piece is Elisa (Sally Hawkins), who lives alone in an apartment above a crumbling repertory cinema in downtown Baltimore, and works nights as a charlady at the pointedly named Occam Aerospace Research Centre, where the strange goings-on defy a neatly razored explanation,” writes the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin. “Elisa is, for any number of reasons, the kind of role that comes along just once a lifetime. Hawkins meets it with the performance of one.”
“When a secret classified experiment is rolled into the lab in a water tank, Elisa responds not with fear but with fascination and, upon closer inspection, empathy,” writes David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter. “The fact that the expressive, other-worldly being is played by Doug Jones, who appeared as the similarly amphibious Abe Sapien in del Toro’s Hellboy movies, is an additional sign of the personal thread connecting The Shape of Water to the director’s distinctive body of work. . . . Del Toro and co-writer Vanessa Taylor (Divergent) seamlessly weave in points about societal intolerance toward otherness that pertain no less to a nonhuman discovery than to gay or black Americans in the early 60s.”
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“For the all the social insights and cultural asides, the film never feels digressive,” writes Kate Erbland at IndieWire. “For all the veering from one genre to another, neither does it feel rough. Del Toro’s tight directorial control sees to that.”
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