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Shapes, Sounds, Samples of Love: The Shape of Water Review

The Shape of Water is both soaring and grounded in it's pursuit of love, in all forms; physical love, holy love, unrequited love. It does not burden itself with explanation, with the unnecessary components many films that pursue this course would do. It only shows what it believes it must, and much like love itself, the rest falls uselessly to the wayside.

Many themes run concurrently throughout the film, all with the singular purpose of telling a love story in their own unique ways. How can the voiceless be able to love? How can a God love those different than itself? How can love be so warm yet so treacherous? All of these questions are deeply embedded in the heart of the audience throughout the film, pulling and tugging and gasping for release along with us.

It is a film built upon it's moments, a near recollection of a long-lost love. All that we have left are these moments, these moments of our heart skipping a beat, of our heart being broken, of our beliefs being shattered. This is a clear vision, a director who came in with a solid, uniform expression, and the near ultimate achievement of this.

I must say near because, and this may be the nitpickiest of nitpicks, but there is one character, a singular person who is in but three or four scenes, that simply did not fit. A scientist who seemed to have stumbled in from a Bill Nye segment, who overreaches in every situation and who draws attention away from everything else for nothing else other than to explain. And this is a film that does not need explanation.

This is a film that thrives in simply having had existed. No before. No after. It is what it simply is. And that is a beautiful, gentle thing.

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