Notable Cast: Sally
Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, Doug Jones, Michael
Stuhlbarg, Lauren Lee Smith, Nick Searcy, David Hewlett
If you’re a reader of this site, then you already know that
Guillermo del Toro is one of our favorite directors in modern cinema. His
continued intentions of crafting modern love letters to genres and styles of bygone
eras while maintaining his own style and a refreshing fantastical spin on those
tropes. For these reasons (and a few more), The
Shape of Water was very intriguing. Initial trailers made it look like a pleasantly
different spin on the classic Universal monster flick The Creature from the Black Lagoon (one of my personal favorite
films of all time) and that alone made it a must-see
flick for the year. However, The Shape of
Water is far more than that. Like many of del Toro’s other films, this one
is a unique blend of various genres threaded together with an immensely effective
use of thematic material and written for maximum audience resonance. It doesn’t
always play things by the book, thankfully so, and it might be abrasive for
more mainstream audiences, but it’s hard for me not to say that this is another
masterpiece of cinematic craftmanship from one of the industry’s finest voices.
The Shape of Water is stunning from
its visuals to its content and it’s not to be missed.