Given the Oscars it won and the fact that it was directed by Guillermo del Toro, I feel obliged to watch this though I wasn’t enthusiastic after reading some very disparaging comments about it on Broken Forum.  Unfortunately, those reports turned out to be very much correct. This is a beautiful film in terms of production values but an abject failure on every other level.

It’s the height of the space race between the US and Russia and Elisa Esposito works as a cleaner at a top secret government laboratory at night. Mute due to an injury incurred as a baby, she is friends with her elderly artist neighbor Giles and her co-worker Zelda. One day a strange amphibious humanoid creature is brought to the lab, overseen by a sadistic military man Colonel Strickland who captured him in South America. The creature is hostile to the scientists, severing two of Strickland’s fingers but responds well to Elisa tempting him with food and music. When an American general gives his approval to vivisect the creature in order to learn more about his biology, Elisa embarks on an audacious plan to break him out of the lab, roping in her friends to help her. The plan seems doomed to fail except that one of the scientists is actually a Russian infiltrator who decides to help Elisa.

In terms of visual aesthetics, The Shape of Water looks exquisite and I swear it gives me a distinctly BioShock vibe. The watery theme, the fact that Elisa goes to the lab only at night and the consequent neon lights as she traverses the city, the music of the era, the tone of the colors etc. all evoke the game for me. As expected, the design of the amphibious creature is both detailed and beautiful with an emphasis on making him look simultaneously alien and yet human instead of being purely otherworldly as in del Toro’s earlier creatures. Unfortunately this is pretty much all that is decent about the film. The story is a purely by-the-book retelling of saving a sympathetic creature from government scientists with the only surprise being how inconsistent they were with the creature’s abilities and the dumbness of the villains’ motivations. The characters are uninteresting stereotypes and the dialogue was so bad that it was distressing to me. The scene in which General Hoyt threatens Strickland for example is overwritten nonsense.

The film makes so many mistakes on many levels that it’s hard zero in on them. But at the heart of it I think is that it tries to have at least the trappings of science-fiction but fails utterly. It’s silly to have the scientists speculate that they can improve the ability of astronauts to survive in space by vivisecting the creature. Details like how it needs salt water to survive and a regular diet of protein clash badly with its seemingly magical ability to heal itself and others. Del Toro would have been far better off sticking to his usual formula of keeping things ambiguous and inexplicable to preserve a sense of magic and mystery such as in Pan’s Labyrinth. Similarly the film is badly directed in that the director’s for each scene is obvious yet the effect he evokes goes in the opposite direction. Scenes that are clearly meant to be romantic or moving come across as being laughably dumb. A good example for how tone deaf del Toro was is the dancing scene which doesn’t belong at all.

So yeah, this is bad film on every level that del Toro should be embarrassed of and it’s the disgrace that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences should choose to honor it with so many awards.