Elena's Review Of the Film The Shape Of Water

You can approach this film just as a fairy tale. Many heroes/ heroines in fairy tales have a disability or anomaly or misfortune that is just a sign of future greatness. This is the point of the ugly duckling or the abnormally small feet of Cinderella. One of the defining abilities of humans is speech. Dogs can understand language, apes can but they don’t speak and the woman at the core of this film is unable to speak. She also has 3 rare marks in her neck that mimic gills as they turn out to be in the last scene. She was predestined to be some kind of amphibian, somebody under or beyond human.

The story can also be seen as a political parable of course, with a militaristic, paranoid society governed by white males that consider aliens as something to be chained, slaved, studied and killed, treat blacks as subhumans, as well as gays, abuse women and humiliate the working class. And their reckoning is a conspiracy of the oppressed.

But it can also be seen as a psychoanalytical plot. Water is a classical symbol of unbound energy, subconscious energy. The amphibian being is a bridge between the rational man and his unconscious mind. This is of course, dangerous. The whole secret lab and it’s workers are symbols of the rational aspect of man fighting what cannot control.

There is also a nature vs culture meaning. The being removed from a remote place in nature can not survive for long in a city. But nature can be assaulted, injured and chained and still not destroyed. The creature can heal his wounds, the alpha man cannot. He lost his fingers  and he was unable to put them back, it is the route to extinction.