(Yes, somehow del Toro makes hard-boiled eggs romantic.) Back home, Eliza’s neurotic, swooning neighbor, Giles (a heartbreaking Richard Jenkins) pines after a handsome pie-shop waiter and mourns his wasted youth. Over time, in furtive and stolen moments, Eliza develops a bond with the creature, communicating with it/him through sign language and offerings of hard-boiled eggs. One fateful evening, some kind of humanoid aquatic creature arrives for study, hauled in by a nefarious government agent played with controlled gonzo by Michael Shannon. An improbable love story intertwines dexterously with a 1950s sci-fi thriller, creating a film that’s remarkable not only for its thorough and impeccably detailed design, but for the thoughtfulness of its messaging.Ī fabulous, expressive Sally Hawkins plays Eliza, a mute, but not deaf, woman who works nights as a janitor at a government scientific facility outside Baltimore. Not so with The Shape of Water, which he co-wrote with Vanessa Taylor. Gimmick and homage without any real feeling behind it.
He’s crafted plenty of stunning visual moments, but beyond his exquisite wartime fantasia Pan’s Labyrinth, his films have had the fussy, reference-y obsessiveness of Quentin Tarantino at his worst. To me, he’s always seemed like a technical whiz-kid whose emotional maturity never evolved past his teenage fanboy years. Which is not something I thought I would ever say about a Guillermo del Toro film.
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