THE SHAPE OF WATER

'''THE SHAPE OF WATER. Guillermo del Toro, director, producer (with J. Miles Dale), story, and script with Vanessa Taylor.''' Paul D. Austerberry, production design. Canada/USA: Bull Productions, Double Dare You, Fox Searchlight Pictures (production) / Fox Searchlight Pictures and 20th Century Fox (distribution in US and most of Earth), 2017.

Science fiction and fantasy Romance, sort of THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954, significantly) meets E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL. Significant here for the imprisonment and occasional torture of the Creature in an underground — not very deep but still subterranean — US government Cold War laboratory, giving the image of the Creature's pool and cylindrical holding chamber surrounded by machinery and electronic equipment from the late 1950s: Modern but skewed toward the Industrial/Brutal esthetic. The narrative arc is from this threatening containment in a mechanized, technologized, and militarized underworld toward watery freedom (and love of a human woman) in a rain-retention/release canal in or near Baltimore, MD, a canal that leads to a river and eventually the Atlantic Ocean.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 26Dec17