Released in 2017 under the visionary direction of fantasy master Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water established itself as one of the most captivating gothic fables of modern cinema. By blending interspecies romance, Cold War historical drama, and spy thriller elements, the feature film not only swept four Academy Awards—including Best Picture and Best Director—but also redefined how genre cinema approaches otherness, loneliness, and the transformative power of love in times of political and social oppression.
Analysis and Plot: The Poetry of Difference under the Shadow of the Cold War
Set in Baltimore in 1962, at the height of anti-communist paranoia and the space race, The Shape of Water follows the monotonous and lonely routine of Elisa Esposito (played with sublime expressiveness by Sally Hawkins). Elisa is a mute orphan who works as a night-shift cleaner at a top-secret U.S. government aerospace research center. Her only connections to the outside world are her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), a gay advertising illustrator struggling with his declining career and social rejection, and Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer), her protective Black coworker who navigates the daily hardships of structural racism and an unhappy marriage.
Elisa's life takes an irreversible turn when the lab receives a mysterious and highly confidential cargo: an amphibious humanoid creature (played under heavy makeup by Doug Jones), captured in the Amazon, where it was worshipped as a god by local tribes. Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), the brutal military officer in charge of the project, sees the "Asset" only as a biological tool to be dissected for technological advantages against the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Dr. Robert Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), a scientist who is actually an undercover Soviet spy named Dimitri Misenkov, becomes fascinated by the creature's intelligence and attempts to prevent its destruction.
While cleaning the room where the amphibian man is kept chained, Elisa develops a silent, mutual connection with him. Through simple gestures—sharing hard-boiled eggs, playing Benny Goodman vinyl records, and teaching him sign language—she realizes that the creature possesses feelings, intellect, and deep sensitivity. While the outside world sees her as "incomplete" due to her muteness, in the creature's eyes, Elisa is seen as whole. When Strickland decides to sacrifice the being to study its respiratory system, Elisa plans a daring escape with the help of Giles, Zelda, and Dr. Hoffstetler himself, who decides to prioritize science and morality over his espionage orders.
"When he looks at me, he doesn't know how I am incomplete. He sees me for what I am."
— Elisa Esposito
The Climax and Detailed Explanation of the Ending
The escape is successful, and Elisa keeps the creature in her bathtub, waiting for torrential rains to flood the local canal so she can release him into the ocean. During this period of intimate cohabitation, the romantic relationship between the two is consummated physically and spiritually. The creature's touch demonstrates healing properties: he regenerates Giles's hair and heals wounds. However, confinement in freshwater begins to weaken the amphibian man's health, accelerating the urgency of his departure.
In the climax, during a torrential downpour at the docks, Strickland intercepts the couple after tracking the creature's whereabouts. Driven by a messianic fury and the decline of his own physical sanity (his stitched fingers are necrotizing), the villain brutally shoots the creature and Elisa in the chest. However, the amphibious being uses his divine regenerative abilities to heal instantly, slits Strickland's throat with his claws, and rescues the dying Elisa, jumping with her into the depths of the canal.
It is in the depths of the water that the ending reaches its lyrical and symbolic peak. The amphibian man embraces Elisa and, upon touching the slit-like scars on her neck—marks of childhood abuse that left her mute—he transforms them into functional gills. Elisa opens her eyes and breathes underwater. Giles's final narration suggests they lived happily ever after, united in an element where gravity, prejudice, and the pain of the terrestrial world cannot reach them.
Hidden Meanings of the Ending: Elisa's transformation can be interpreted in two main ways:
- Literal Magical Realism: Elisa was always, latently, a creature of a similar nature (an orphan found by a riverbank with marks on her neck), which would explain her immediate attraction to water and her inability to speak human language. The creature's intervention merely "awakened" her true dormant essence.
- Poetic Metaphor of Death and Liberation: From a more melancholic perspective, the final scene can be seen as a spiritual transition at the moment of Elisa's death. Water represents the unconscious, unconditional love, and the definitive escape from a violent, patriarchal, and intolerant reality. Freeing oneself from terrestrial oxygen is to free oneself from the shackles of social oppression.
The fluidity of water, the film's central theme, contrasts with the rigidity of the laboratory concrete and the moral inflexibility of the oppressors. As the final poem recited by Giles indicates, love has no defined shape, adapting to and filling the empty spaces of those who allow themselves to love.
Cast and Standout Performances
The success of The Shape of Water rests heavily on the delivery of its stellar cast. Sally Hawkins delivers the performance of her career. Without uttering a single spoken word (with the exception of a beautiful, dreamlike imagined musical sequence), Hawkins uses her eyes, micro-facial expressions, and body language to convey an overwhelming range of loneliness, desire, courage, and sweetness. Her Academy Award nomination for Best Actress was widely deserved.
Doug Jones, Del Toro's long-time collaborator (famous for playing the Faun and the Pale Man in Pan's Labyrinth), performs a Herculean task under the amphibian man's prosthetics. Jones manages to inject humanity, regality, and savagery into the monster, balancing animal threat with vulnerable innocence without the aid of invasive digital effects.
Michael Shannon creates a multifaceted antagonist in Richard Strickland. He is not just a cartoon monster; he represents the idealized American man of the 1960s—obsessed with status, consumerism, and power—but who rots from within under the pressure of toxic masculinity and the fear of failure. Richard Jenkins (Giles) and Octavia Spencer (Zelda) provide the necessary emotional support, serving as pillars of historical representation for the marginalized groups of the era (the LGBTQIA+ community and the Black population in the civil rights era).
Art Direction and Color Palette: Green and Red
The film's visual aesthetic is a masterclass in chromatic storytelling. Guillermo del Toro and his production designer, Paul Austerberry, used a strictly coded color palette to guide the viewer's emotions. Strickland's military, bureaucratic, and alienated world is dominated by cold tones of teal, gray, and faded leaf green—colors that evoke stagnation, cold technology, and Cold War paranoia (including the iconic "teal" green Cadillac that Strickland buys).
In contrast, red is used extremely sparingly and surgically to represent passion, life, love, and cinema. At the beginning, Elisa's apartment is immersed in aquatic greens. As she falls in love with the creature, small red details begin to appear in her wardrobe: a hair ribbon, her shoes, and finally, a vibrant red coat in the film's climax. Red consumes the palette to signal that she has finally found her warmth in a frigid world.
Behind-the-Scenes Trivia
- Alcoholic Conception: Guillermo del Toro revealed that the idea to cast Sally Hawkins came after he watched her in the British drama Submarine (2010). He wrote the script specifically for her, and upon meeting her drunk at a 2014 Golden Globes party, the director hugged her and whispered, "I'm writing a movie for you where you fall in love with a fish-man!"
- The Makeup Challenge: Doug Jones's preparation to transform into the creature took about three hours daily. The suit was made of latex and foam, being so tight that the actor could barely hear or breathe. He needed constant help to move and even to sit down during filming breaks.
- Tight Budget: Despite the stunning visuals that appear to have cost over 60 million dollars, the film was made with a modest budget of just 19.5 million. To make the production viable, Del Toro gave up his own director's salary to ensure the creature's practical effects and set design were perfect.
- Religious Metaphor: Del Toro intentionally built the film as an inversion of the classic Universal monster movie Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). While in the classic film the monster is killed for coveting the white woman, in The Shape of Water the creature is saved by her, subverting the "foreign/monstrous danger" narrative.
Behind-the-Scenes Controversies and Plagiarism Accusations
Despite its critical triumph, The Shape of Water's path to the Oscars was marked by intense legal controversies and plagiarism accusations that nearly overshadowed its frontrunner status.
The most serious accusation came from the estate of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Zindel. The author's son, David Zindel, filed a federal lawsuit claiming that Del Toro's script was a direct plagiarism of his father's 1969 television play, titled Let Me Hear You Whisper. The play tells the story of a lonely janitor who works in a military lab and establishes a deep connection with a captive intelligent dolphin, attempting to save it from being dissected to the sound of music. The lawsuit was initially dismissed by a district judge in 2018 but reopened on appeal in 2020. In 2021, the parties reached a confidential out-of-court settlement, and the Zindel estate dropped the lawsuit, admitting the film was an entirely original work.
Additionally, acclaimed French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (director of Amélie and Delicatessen) publicly accused Guillermo del Toro of plagiarizing a specific scene from his film Delicatessen (1991)—the one where characters dance while sitting on a bed, imitating tap dance steps to the sound of an old TV. Del Toro responded politely to Jeunet's accusations, stating that his influences came directly from the musicals of Hollywood's golden age (such as those of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) and classics by Georges Méliès, denying any intention to copy.
Critical Reception, Box Office, and Legacy
The reception of The Shape of Water was overwhelmingly warm from critics and the general public. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an impressive 92% approval rating, based on over 450 reviews, with the consensus praising Del Toro's lyrical direction, the breathtaking production design, and Sally Hawkins's magnetic performance.
At the box office, the film proved to be a resounding commercial success for an R-rated fantasy drama (due to nudity and violence). The feature grossed over 195 million dollars worldwide, multiplying its initial production budget tenfold.
| Analysis Category | Result / Production Data |
|---|---|
| Director | Guillermo del Toro |
| Budget | $19.5 million dollars |
| Worldwide Box Office | $195.3 million dollars |
| Major Oscar Awards | Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Score, Best Production Design |
| Rotten Tomatoes Rating | 92% approval (Critics Consensus) |
The legacy of The Shape of Water lies in its courageous celebration of the "Other." In a Hollywood often pasteurized by formulaic blockbusters, Del Toro delivered a work of art that is, at once, a love letter to classic cinema, an anti-fascist political manifesto, and one of the most unique love stories in the history of modern cinema. The film proved that monsters are not always those with scary appearances; often, true monstrosity hides under tailored suits, deep-seated prejudices, and the coldness of institutionalized power.
Sources Researched
- Box Office Mojo: boxofficemojo.com/title/tt5580544/
- Rotten Tomatoes: rottentomatoes.com/m/the_shape_of_water_2017
- The Hollywood Reporter (Plagiarism Lawsuit Updates): hollywoodreporter.com
- Variety (Guillermo del Toro Interview and Production Design): variety.com
- Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Oscar Database): oscars.org
