The Creature from the Baltimore Lagoon
The Shape of Water is kind of like Free Willy, if someone had banged the whale.
Given that this is a Guillermo Del Toro movie, should we be surprised? No. But what does continue to baffle us is Del Toro’s ability to make major motion pictures, ones with special effects budgets no less! Because there’s no way John and Jane Doe, humble flag-loving folk from down the street, could possibly connect with his proprietary brand of childish naiveté and creep.
Fittingly, Del Toro dresses his leading lady Elisa, played by 42-year-old Sally Hawkins, like a little girl, even making her a mute so as preserve a child-like innocence. Even more fittingly, he kicks off the movie by having her masturbate in a bathtub – an uncomfortable moment for us all.
She lives in Baltimore (sadly the accent makes no appearance), in a shambolic 1960s apartment – no small feat given that this movie takes place during the 1960s; the furniture can’t be more than a few years old. Also entering obsolescence are Elisa’s friend Giles (Richard Jenkins), a gay poster artist in the apartment next door, and the city of the Baltimore itself, as evidenced by the race riots on Giles’ television. Del Toro’s cinematic universe is a marginal one – like mold growing on a plate in an eccentric’s apartment.
As a meek woman in cinema must, Elisa works as a cleaning woman. But her beat is the local top secret military lab, where she and co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) mop up water, urine, and eventually blood from a South American river creature who arrives in a sealed tank accompanied bad guy Richard (Michael Shannon, in a role to which he is almost too obviously suited).
From there, the story unravels in largely predictable fashion. In order to sell us on what is, essentially, a story about bestiality, Del Toro has smartly, if not totally convincingly, played up the inequality angle – including a scene where a pie shop manager denies service to a black couple, as well as another in which Richard suggests that the Almighty probably looks a little more like him than Elisa’s black co-worker Zelda. The joke’s on him, Del Toro wagers: God probably looks like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.