The Shape of Water, a movie like none other

At his best Guillermo Del Toro has definitely earned a place as one of the top directors in the world today - first with Pan's Labyrinth, one of the best films of this century, and now w/ the multi-nominated Oscar contender The Shape of Water. This film is so unusual that no plot summary can do it justice; a movie about a young woman (Sally Hawkins - who was awesome a few years back in the comedy Happy-go-lucky), who is mute, who works in janitorial service at a highly classified defense plant and who lives alone w/ almost no social life, befriends a fantastical creature - a river god from South America - that is under study in a top-secret project at the defense plant and eventually, with the aid of her neighbor, a homosexual, alcoholic, failing commercial artist (Richard Jenkins) and a co-worker (Octavia Spencer), captures the creature, falls in love w/ him/it, has sex with him/it, and sets it free. The setting is ca 1960, deep in the "cold war," and a group of Russian infiltrators are also seeking to capture this sea creature. Enough? Sounds ridiculous, and of course it is ridiculous if taken literally, but whether you have a taste for fantasy in films or not (generally, I don't), there's no question that Del Toro realizes (makes real) every aspect of this haunting and unusual tale - through great attention to detail (the settings are weird, dreamlike) and through use of every facet of cinematography. In effect, he tells a story that can only be told on film - as purse a cinematic narrative as you'll ever see. On top of this, he gets fine performances from his leads (also including Michael Shannon as the heavy and the ubiquitous Stuhlberg as a Russian agent). Does this movie have everything we expect from a great picture? Maybe not quite - it's a little heavy-handed (the time period allows for some too-easy jabs at American apartheid of the era) and it's not exactly a laugh riot and some of the improbabilities, even w/in the world of fantasy - could a bathwater tap actually flood an entire bathroom, leaving the rest of the apartment in the dry?, could or would neighbors and co-workers learn sign language so readily? - strain credulity. All that said, it's a movie that falls w/in 2 genres - spy v spy and woman falls in love w/ "creature" (e,g., King Kong, the once well-known novel Mrs Prospero, by Rachel Ingalls) - and comes out as a complete original, perfectly capturing Del Toro's intent and vision, a movie like none other.