With a huge weight of expectation from early festival screenings and awards, The Shape Of Water more or less lives up to the hype. This is, at its heart, a simple fable, a universal love story that tells its story quite brilliantly. At his best - and he is here - del Toro walks an intriguing tightrope between melodrama and fantasy, and in this movie every scene has a purpose, every detail is lovingly crafted on screen from the period sets to the finely judged performances (Sally Hawkins is stunning, Doug Jones creates an extraordinarily sympathetic creature-character, and Octavia Spencer, Richard Jenkins and Michael Shannon all provide very admirable support). It also is imbued with a love of cinema (as a medium and as a place) and musicals (one very La La Land sequence will melt even the hardest of hearts), and it is not afraid to raise issues of racism and homophobia of the time. It could be argued that the entire plot is very predictable, but this is story-telling used with such verve, panache and beauty that is quite captivating.
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