Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Shape of Water’ on Hulu, Guillermo del Toro’s Lovely Creature from the Black Lagoony Fairy Tale

It’s finally sort of officially the mid-pandemic awards season, so it makes sense for Hulu to add a recent-past Oscar winner like The Shape of Water, which won Guillermo del Toro Best Picture and Best Director trophies in 2018. A chunk of the conversation at the time emphasized how it was a conservative choice, the Academy choosing it over Greta Gerwig’s femme-com Lady Bird, Jordan Peele’s Black-experience horror film Get Out and Luca Guadagnino’s LGBTQ love saga Call Me By Your Name — all inarguably great movies, but remember, The Shape of Water is by a Mexican director, pits a woman with a disability, a Black woman and a gay man against a patriarchic white Christian man, and features a protagonist who, for lack of a better phrase, F—S A FISH. Conservative my tuckus. I watched the film twice during its release, once for professional reasons, and the second time out of the compulsion some of us feel to see a movie again because it’s so funny, touching, exciting and/or inventive. Now let’s see how it holds up after three years.

THE SHAPE OF WATER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A dream: An apartment, submerged underwater, aquamarine, tables and chairs and shoes floating, a woman hovering angelically over a sofa and sleeping peacefully, a gentle narrator speaking of “the princess without a voice.” An alarm clock rings. She awakens. She’s Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins). She sleeps during the day and works at night. She drops some eggs in boiling water, sets an egg timer, gets in the tub and moans as she touches the part of her connected to her own eggs, ding! All done. She dresses and packs her lunch and visits her friend next door, Giles (Richard Jenkins), a lonely gay man who sketches and paints while watching old musicals on television with his many cats. She cannot speak, and communicates with sign language, but they barely need it — she and Giles have a lovely, close, intuitive friendship. They live above a movie theater, their apartments like thought balloons floating above the big screen like dreams.

Elisa takes the bus to Occam, a Baltimore research facility, where she works the graveyard janitorial shift. She mops and dusts and polishes alongside another great friend, Zelda (Octavia Spencer), who makes up for Elisa’s muteness with a running logorrhea about her no-good husband and her aching feet. Elisa is by herself and Giles is by himself and Zelda damn well feels like she’s by herself. Soon enough, another character joins their outcast gang, the Amphibious Man (Doug Jones), a scaly, clawed and gilled fish fellow hauled out of the South American jungle by Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), a Caucasian fool tasked by the government to weaponize the creature for Cold War use. He communicates with the Black Lagoonie via cattle prod, and has to get two fingers sewed back on as a result. With the two women who clean the secret underground facility housing its murky pool, Strickland’s communique is far less physical, but pretty much just as bad. If he was the person to die if you were to press a button and receive a million bucks without repercussion, you might press it twice and tell them to keep the million bucks.

Did I mention it’s 1962? Yeah, not a great time to be gay, Black or disabled — or a creature from a black lagoon, for that matter. Did I also mention that Elisa was an orphan “found by the river,” and she has odd, gill-like scars on her neck, which may not be coincidental in the context of a plot in which she beauty-and-the-beasts with the Amphibian Man, offering her eggs — lunch eggs, not the other eggs, yet — to him when the facility is otherwise empty. In the creature, Strickland sees an abomination, but Elisa sees an enchanting soul, and the lab’s scientist, Dr. Robert Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), sees her see an enchanting soul, and mostly agrees with her POV, but not quite, since she seems, well, to put it indelicately, horny for the guy and his spiny bristle of dorsal accoutrements.

So what happens to a fascinating, weird, beautiful, dangerous, frightening, majestic beast like this in this type of story? The nasty white guy quotes the Bible, orders vivisection, buys a gigantic Cadillac and goes home to the nuclear suburb family he sure seems to hate. A heist must happen, and it involves Elisa, a phony ID, a laundry truck and a little help from her friends. How ELSE would she be able to get him back to her aquamarine love palace?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Any number of Beauty and the Beasts — including, but not limited to, musical, animated or giant-ape-and-Faye-Wray versions of such — The Wizard of Oz, E.T. and of course the greatest, but least appreciated of the Universal Monsters, Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Performance Worth Watching: The film is an embarrassment of acting riches. Spencer’s comic relief, Hawkins’ sympathetic protagonist, Shannon’s vile antagonist, Jenkins’ concerned best friend, Stuhlbarg’s conflicted scientist, even Jones’ physical mannerisms beneath a marvelous bevy of prosthetics and animatronics and digital effects — all are pitch-perfect. Shannon really MICHAEL SHANNONs the living hell out of his role, and you hate to love it. But none of it works if Hawkins doesn’t so exquisitely express Elisa’s mystery, sexuality, strength and vulnerability, in tune with the tone del Toro and Vanessa Taylor’s neo-fairy-tale screenplay

Memorable Dialogue: Elisa, spelling out sign language to Strickland: “F-U-C-K Y-O-U.”

Zelda makes a strong case for never again making her husband pigs in a blanket for dinner: “Boy, he just ate ’em up. No thank yous. No yum-yums. Not a peep. Man is as silent as a grave. But if farts were flattery, honey, he’d be Shakespeare.”

Strickland: “There he is. Dr. F—ing Shitbird.”

Sex and Skin: Full frontal and full back-al by Hawkins and fishboy, although his junk appears to be hidden within some type of cloacal vent, thank Jebus.

Our Take: The original Creature from the Black Lagoon features a hair-raising sequence in which Julie Adams swims in the river, and the Gill-man mirrors her moves directly beneath her, several feet underwater, curious, stalking, admiring. Now modernize the moment, but instead of pushing the sexuality into the subtext, emphasize it, and suggest some kind of mythical destiny for the woman. That’s The Shape of Water, a richly realized fairy tale from del Toro, a visionary who now has two masterpieces in his oeuvre — this and the singular Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s whimsical, tragic, suspenseful, empathetic, loveable, loving, a little distressing and very weird. No one else could have made this movie, or maybe even have the guts to try.

I recognize its lack of subtlety. Strickland is a loathsome construct of a villain, a symbol of brutal and corrupt Americanism, militaristic, violent, tyrannical, a most vile alpha who still has his “thumb, trigger and p—y finger” while the other two turn green and rot on his hand, oozing pus as he loses his controlling grip on the situation, intimidating women, dominating what he perceives to be animals, covering his wife’s mouth with his bloody bandaged hand as they assume the missionary position because he prefers that women be silent. Today, he’d be screaming “CUCK!” at all the “betas” as he slowly sinks into a tar pit, his type achieving extinction. Patriarchy, privilege. What did Elisa sign at him again? Not words of gratitude. This is all right at the forefront of this movie, and if it were any less conspicuous, it wouldn’t be so righteously delicious — and it wouldn’t give us such a satisfyingly comic Michael Shannon performance.

Del Toro’s intent, I believe, isn’t to be political. Although it’s an important thread, he unites his disenfranchised protagonists beneath an umbrella of loneliness and isolation, in a quest to save one, maybe two, of their own. Although the creature looks bizarre, his plight is utterly human. He’s been forcefully ripped from his home and tortured, and appears to be the last of his kind. The tale of Elisa and Fibsie — can I call him Fibsie? — is couched in a mythos inspired by Grimm fables and the like, and del Toro brings it to life with enchanting visual poetry, melancholic tones and a sparkling blend of comedy and romance. So yes, it holds up quite nicely, thank you.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Now that we’re a few trips around the sun beyond that particular horserace, let’s just say that The Shape of Water is just as wonderful as Get Out, Call Me By Your Name and Lady Bird, and we should rewatch them all every so often from here on out.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream The Shape of Water