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Guillermo Del Toro's Film The Shape Of Water

726 Words3 Pages

Guillermo del Toro recently won Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival for his latest film The Shape of Water - a great achievement in a career of this 52-year old Mexican filmmaker who, as a kid, only wanted to make monster films.

A cross between a creature feature and a fairy tale, The Shape of Water tells a story of a mute cleaning woman named Elisa (Sally Hawkins) who falls in love with a humanoid sea creature imprisoned in a science facility ran by the belligerent Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon). Del Toro 's film is heavily indebted to a 1954 Universal monster film Creature from the Black Lagoon, where a creature like the one in The Shape of Water hunts down a group of scientists in the Amazon. In the Black Lagoon 's two sequels - Revenge of the Creature (1955) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956) …show more content…

The film takes place in Spain in 1944 where fascist forces of General Francisco Franco have won the brutal civil war only five years ago. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is a sensitive girl whose sickly mother (Ariadna Gil) just married brutal and selfish Captain Vidal (Sergi López). Ofelia discovers an old labyrinth garden where she meets Pan (again, Doug Jones) and undergoes a quest to gain immortality. Del Toro here deliberately muddles the easy dichotomy between prosaic reality and magical world of make-believe. Ofelia 's real-life story plays out like a Grimm fairy tale of abused children and wicked step-parents. Meanwhile, the world of the labyrinth is far from an escapist fantasy - it is full of dangers and real-life tragic consequences for Ofelia. But yet again, true monsters aren 't the ones who simply follow their nature but the low-ranking army officer of a burgeoning fascist police-state who uses his power to hurt and kill those even less powerful than him, even when he claims to care about. Pan 's Labyrinth is an unsettling, yet undoubtedly beautiful and heartfelt

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