Others Magazine

By Mark Hadley

Do you know what you can know for certain about someone who finishes an argument with abuse? Not even they are wholly convinced of the truth of their position.

It’s an axiom that will ring true for Christians watching the celebrated love story, The Shape of Water. It’s not enough for writer/director Guillermo del Toro to argue that any form of love is acceptable.

When the argument falters, he needs to vilify God to distract his viewers from its lack of credibility. The Shape of Water centres on Elisa Esposito, a mute woman whose life is caught in a spiral of tedium.

She lives in a grimy at above a dilapidated cinema that shows re-runs of Hollywood’s Golden Age musicals. Elisa, played by Sally Hawkins, has a playful, determined personality, but it’s given little room to thrive. She works as an unappreciated cleaner in the bowels of a shadowy government facility.

No one quite knows what goes on there, least of all her cleaning companion Zelda (Octavia Spencer). However, one day the veil of secrecy lifts a little as the pair witness the arrival of a new specimen from the darkest reaches of the Amazon.

The amphibious being bears a striking resemblance to the Creature From The Black Lagoon, part of the film’s homage to 1950s cinema. However, unlike that creation of Hollywood horror, the specimen Elisa sees is a source of growing sympathy for her.

As a cleaner, she cultivates reasons to visit the vault in which the creature is imprisoned, building up a silent language of support. She discovers that it is both capable of feeling and the victim of terrible tortures at the hands of the facility’s head of security, Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon). When Strickland decides that vivisection would be a better way of uncovering the creature’s abilities, Elisa’s aection blossoms into bravery and finally physical love.

And so, Guillermo del Toro’s production of a truly 21st century love story comes to fruition.

The Shape of Water has far too much nudity and sexual content for comfort. However, Elisa and the creature remain objects of sympathy despite their unnatural relationship. They couldn’t be any more different – different species, in fact. But what would have been considered something extremely unnatural by previous generations is celebrated with every tool at the director’s disposal.

Del Toro has set out to construct a cinematic argument for the beauty of that other “unnatural” attraction, same-sex love. His efforts have certainly won industry approval – The Shape of Water has picked up two Golden Globes – but the audience I viewed it with weren’t so sure of what to do with Elisa’s sexual behaviour.

Elisa is also the victim of dubious righteousness. Strickland the security guard is a great believer in the Bible, in particular the sins of humanity and the wrath of an Old Testament God:

Strickland: That thing may stand on two legs. He may look human. But we’re created in the Lord’s image.
Zelda: What does the Lord look like? Strickland: He looks like us. Well, a little more like me.

Strickland’s Christian character seems to bolster his extreme cruelty, greed, mysogeny, racism, and sexual perversion. He and his religion are thoroughly hateful, but he’s only the leading gure in the film’s outdated society.

Those characters who believe in God are possessed of their own superiority, and though they maintain the importance of decency, they are all controlled by secret sins. It’s a ham-sted attempt at ramming the director’s views home that should be easily detected by any discerning audience.

However, given it’s also the majority view in our secular world, The Shape of Water is likely to be greeted as occasionally awkward to watch, but nonetheless common sense.