After hearing raving reviews about the movie The Shape of Water, I decided to buy a ticket. I had no idea what this movie was going to be about, but I took the chance anyway. All I had heard was that it was a great movie, and I noticed that everyone had strong opinions about it. After buying the ticket, I decided to watch the trailer, and it was mesmerizing. It showed a mute woman named Eliza who wants to save a creature who would die for the purpose of education and experiments. The intense background music helped emphasize the dangers and battle to save this creature. The end scenes of the trailer show Eliza signing, “if we do nothing, neither are we” and then a man’s voice saying, “if I told you about her what would I say, I wonder” as a man stares at a drawing of the creature and the woman hugging. This trailer threw me on the hype wagon. I was super excited to watch the movie.
!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!
After watching the movie, I was on the same boat as most who saw it: I thoroughly enjoyed it. The odd romance, the action, and mystery made it all the more thrilling to watch. The main protagonist is a mute woman who falls in love with a creature at her job in a research lab. This creature is an amphibian man with fish features (and a killer set of abs). He is seen and worshipped as a God by many people, but at the facility, he is tormented and attacked. Eliza, from the beginning, is VERY attracted to water, and as she connects more and more with the creature, she decides she wants to save him from those at the facility where he’s trapped. She almost sets him free, but because of his love for her, he stays with her instead of escaping and is shot. As if I weren’t shocked enough, Eliza was shot too!
Then an awesome scene happens where an old man, Eliza’s best friend, knocks the shooter down with a big piece of wood. The creature walks toward the shooter, who had awoken and began reloading his gun. He slices his neck after the man realizes he had messed up and says, “oh shit, you are a God.” Then the creature walks back to Eliza, takes her from the old man’s arm, and jumps into the water. He proceeds to swim around dead Eliza and finally holds her and kisses her. The scars on her neck open up into gills and she is alive!!!
The creature turns Eliza into a fish, taking her away from her coworker and from her best friend. Unfortunately, the amphibian and Eliza still can’t really communicate with each other. Then my friend suggests that maybe Eliza was already a fish to begin with, because she’d had scars on her body that looked like gills since she was young and was found by a river. This scene confused me, because I wanted a definite answer rather than something that was up for interpretation. Then the audience hears the old man’s voice at the end say, “if I told you about her what would I say, I wonder.” This ending made me wonder if this was a story the old man made up or if this was a story the old man was retelling.
Overall, it was a great movie. 10/10 would watch it again. There were a few comedic scenes like Eliza explaining how she had sex with the amphibian man and the old man’s reaction to the amphibian eating his cat. There were a few “omg why” and “WTH” scenes like the bad man not washing his hands and sniffing her decapitated fingers, or the bad man and his wife having sex. Then there were the heart fluttering, “Aww” scenes, such as Eliza proclaiming her love for the creature or Eliza filling up her bathroom completely with water to be with the amphibian man. The movie made me feel a rollercoaster of emotions, and by the end I was able to say that I really enjoyed it and liked all the little elements they incorporated which connected the story really well.