Guillermo del Toro’s latest film, Shape of Water, looks like a fantastic return to his Pan’s Labyrinth roots, and has been racking up circuit awards. It recently won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Via Vox:
The Shape of Water, set in Cold War-era Baltimore, is full of characters who are different and lonely.
Eliza, besides being an orphan, is mute — she can hear, but she communicates through sign language with Giles and Zelda (Octavia Spencer), her co-worker at the research facility where they clean labs. Life seems to have passed right by Giles, a commercial artist whose skills are being phased out by a photo-mad advertising economy, and he’s nursing a hopeless crush on the handsome owner of the pie shop nearby. Zelda, already viewed with disdain by the lab’s white employees because she’s black, is married to a man she loves but who seems to see her as an inconvenience. Zelda and Eliza’s boss is security supervisor Strickland (Michael Shannon), an imposing and prejudiced man who carries around a cattle prod and is desperate to please his superiors, which he hides behind a blowhard demeanor.
Strickland has traveled from the Amazon to the lab with a creature he calls “the Asset” (Doug Jones), an imposing water-dwelling creature that has gills like a fish but can stand like a man and has two breathing systems, though the above-water anatomy shuts down after too long without water.
The creature’s multiple breathing systems are being studied in the lab for their military applications by Dr. Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), who is also a Soviet spy. Hoffstetler sees the Asset as a marvel. Strickland, a bigot, just calls it an “abomination.”
But Eliza has always been the outsider, and she is curious about the Asset. Over the course of many furtive visits to the lab by Eliza, they develop a connection. And when the lab’s and the military’s plans for the Asset become clear, she knows she can’t just sit by and watch. She has to take action.
Looking forward to the film!