The Shape of Water (2017)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
An other-worldly story, set against the backdrop of Cold War era America circa 1962, where a mute janitor working at a lab falls in love with an amphibious man being held captive there and devises a plan to help him escape.
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82 films that influenced The Shape of Water
What critics say influenced The Shape of Water
Some of the best monster movies, such as King Kong and Creature from the Black Lagoon , allow rivulets of romantic longing to run through their narratives.
Del Toro's Baltimore is also governed by an aquatic color theme, which establishes a link between the city and the brackish water world inhabited by the Amphibian Man (Doug Jones), a humanoid sea creature who suggests a sensitive and elegant relative of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
There are splashes of the creature from Pan’s Labyrinth mixed with the Creature from the Black Lagoon in this character.
Del Toro has said that the film was inspired by seeing Creature From the Black Lagoon as a 6-year-old boy in Mexico.
Part Abe Sapien from Hellboy, part Creature from the Black Lagoon, and entirely lovable despite his monstrous features and demeanor.
Review: The manufactured sense of nostalgia, the whimsical protagonist, the dewy-glazed visual palette, the twee romantic setup: these all had me fearing a jaunt down Amélie way in the opening scenes of The Shape of Water.
If you know Delicatessen , The City of Lost Children and Amelie , you'll be unmistakably reminded of their colour palette and sense for an interior space.
If you can imagine an aggressively adorable (and somewhat effortful) version of Amélie in which our hero fucks the Creature from the Black Lagoon, then you'll totally be feeling this.
Though set in Baltimore in the early 1960s at the height of the Cold War, Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water truly takes place in Movieland: that generic realm of borrowed fantasies where The Majestic and Amélie are also set.
You’re being charmed by the Amelie-like musical score and the whimsical characters when oh, hey, there’s Michael Shannon being very gross while having relations with his wife.
The best parts of “The Shape of Water,” a fantasy fairy tale set in 1962 in a top-secret aerospace research center, are marvelously rhapsodic in ways that recall films like Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast” without ever seeming slavish.
Doug Jones: the secret creature, thought a god by the villagers from whose land he was torn, akin to the “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” but also the beauty and the beast from the myth, especially Jean Cocteau’s 1946 “Beauty and the Beast.”
Guillermo del Toro’s new horror-fantasy The Shape of Water gives striking, at times unsettling, and at other times deeply moving form to Williams’s argument, building from a long line of classic horror and fantasy films ranging from The Phantom of the Opera (1927), to King Kong (1933), to Beauty and the Beast (1946) about tortured romances between misunderstood monstrosities and the women who come to love them.
There is one such astonishing moment: a glitzy 1930s-style black-and-white musical reverie featuring Elisa and the merman dancing arm-in-arm that, like the classic movies Giles watches on TV—including a The Little Colonel clip featuring another mismatched but harmonious pair, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Shirley Temple—expresses The Shape of Water ’s old-Hollywood amour.
But with The Shape Of Water , he transmits obsession with his chosen medium both implicitly and explicitly, concocting a self-consciously old-fashioned curiosity that also pauses occasionally to marvel at a snippet of real Golden Age movie magic, like Bill Robinson dancing down the stairs with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel .
The first five minutes is a spot the reference game for any cinephile, from Cleopatra , to The Little Colonel , to Beauty and the Beast , to The Red Shoes .
We catch glimpses of various movies and TV shows, including The Little Colonel , Coney Island , and Mister Ed —the last one particularly fitting, given the talking animal at its center.
On TV, we see Shirley Temple dancing in The Little Colonel (1935) and Betty Grable sashaying with a costumed pantomime horse in Coney Island (1943).
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There are strong undercurrents, too, of the silent pathos of Keaton and Chaplin, interspersed with bouts of musical fantasy, including an audacious Fred and Ginger-style routine that mirrors the monochrome dance designs of Follow the Fleet .
The movie lifts into a black-and-white dance number — a brief re-creation of the set and choreography of “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” (from the Astaire-Rogers film “Follow the Fleet”).
Del Toro constantly evokes shades of “The Creature Walks Among Us,” and “Beauty and the Beast,” while also channeling Woody Allen’s “Purple Rose of Cairo.”
But the most important and uncredited film here is The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and its sequel, the tragedy The Creature Walks Among Us (1956).
While the actual film never happened due to Universal’s rejection of these themes, del Toro saved these ideas to create The Shape of Water .
Effectively a remake of Ron Howard’s Splash with the first act excised, Water ’s a beautiful film with a touching turn from Sally Hawkins, that fails to engage the intellect on any level whatsoever.
What follows is a weird and wondrous romantic thriller that casts its inspirational web wide: from 50s monster movies such as Creature From the Black Lagoon to Ron Howard’s 80s mermaid rom-com Splash , via the 12th-century writings of Persian poet Hakim Sanai.
Michael Shannon dominates many scenes as the sadistic Colonel Strickland, who regards the creature as his personal property – putting him at odds with his colleague Dr Hoffstetier (Michael Stuhlbarg), an eccentric scientist perhaps partly inspired by Eugene Levy in Splash .
If you know Delicatessen , The City of Lost Children and Amelie , you'll be unmistakably reminded of their colour palette and sense for an interior space.
Del Toro and co-writer Vanessa Taylor have created a rich world that is reminiscent of Terry Gilliam at his best, or the early works of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro (“Delicatessen,” “The City of Lost Children”) in its fantastic representation of a fully realized world.
En los colores y el diseño de decorados, The Shape of Water nos recuerda de inmediato el trabajo de la dupla creativa francesa Caro/Jeunet y sus icónicas Delicatessen y La ciudad de los niños perdidos .
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If you know Delicatessen , The City of Lost Children and Amelie , you'll be unmistakably reminded of their colour palette and sense for an interior space.
Del Toro and co-writer Vanessa Taylor have created a rich world that is reminiscent of Terry Gilliam at his best, or the early works of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro (“Delicatessen,” “The City of Lost Children”) in its fantastic representation of a fully realized world.
No date is provided, though “The Story of Ruth” (1960) is playing at the Orpheum cinema below Eliza’s apartment, and “Mister Ed,” which premièred the following year, is on TV.