"The Shape of Water" was something I went back and forth on, but finally went to go see, because I've been housebound for nearly a week and it's February, so there's nothing else in the theaters (that I have not seen). was right to put it off, and should have resisted. It's not particularly exciting as a caper or action film, and resolutely avoids any sci-fi aspects in favor of making its featured creature mysterious, and it's only a horror film to people who are sick of pretentious Hollywood cliches.

Sally Hawkins is Elisa, a mute cleaning woman who works at a government facility in the early 60s in Baltimore, when an aquatic humanoid creature (played by Doug Jones, who played a similar role in the Hellboy films by the same director, Guillermo del Toro) is brought in by Michael Shannon's repressed strawman who embodies everything Hollywood sybarites have hated about pre-1969 American for the last century. The story they think they are telling is about misfits and outsiders bonding and coming together to help each other out of the solidarity of the disenfranchised and really sticking it to the man, because they are smarter, and more resilient and tough and really, just better, more deserving people.

What they are actually telling is the story of a vapid woman with a water fetish whom people randomly fall all over themselves to help out. There is no basis to assume any sort of character-driven reasons for her bonding with the fish-Beast, rather, she is fascinated with him from the moment he is brought into the lab, and is previously established to have some sort of hydro-erotic kink. The woman first appears on screen in a sleeping state represented by an underwater scene. She wakes up, puts some eggs in a pot of water to boil, and then gets into the bathtub to masturbate. The level of subtlety is about what you'd expect from a writer/director whose last popular success was about giant monsters fighting giant robots. Anyway, with this is mind, it's obviously a fish fetish that is driving Elisa, rather than any real human connection. When she learns that the gung-ho military types are going to kill her fish crush, she conceives a plan to smuggle him out, which is really half-assed and stupid and leans heavily on her pathetic loser of a neighbor (but he's intellectual and artistic, and they watch musicals together, so the problem is clearly the whole rest of the world not making him successful), but which works out because two other people in the lab independently figure out what she is doing and intervene to make it work. From there, it's supposed to be all tense as you wait to see if Shannon will catch them before the conditions are right to help the fish guy escape out to sea. These conditions seem fairly arbitrary, considering they are in a port city, but shut up. And there is no suspense, because it is pretty obvious the Shannon will be exactly as competent as needed to drive the plot, and otherwise utterly incompetent so the filmmakers can heap scorn on all that he represents. There is a twist at the end, really so the film can have its cake and eat it too, and the twist is telegraphed from the moment we get Elisa's backstory.

And there's lot of penis imagery, contrasting imagery of female sexuality (hard-boiled eggs are a huge thing) and fish-fucking. Richard Jenkins and Octavia Spencer are good, Shannon is doing his thing, and Hawkins is pretty good as well, especially considering how much she has to sell with just her facial expressions and body language. She speaks with sign language but there is relatively little use of subtitles. It's all artsy and visual and all the stuff that lets them call Del Toro brilliant without asking him to make too many actually entertaining movies that don't rely on women in silly clothes and creatures with eyes where eyes don't usually go.

But overall, this thing is boring. It's target audience is film buffs who want to sneer at 50s sci-fi movies, and it's spite audience is people who come for the usual stuff you expect to see in a movie about the "Creature From the Black Lagoon But Just Different Enough For Copyright Purposes."