Commentary on The Shape of Water.

[Summary: The Shape of Water, the 2017 award-winning film by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, is an adult fairy tale that conducts the audience through the romance of two misunderstood voiceless creatures who, after a long time, find their complement in each other. Elisa Esposito is a mute woman whose last name alludes to her orphanhood and loneliness residing in a world of archetypal normality where the one who is seen as different becomes either invisible or threatening. Immersed in a cold and rigid world of science, she is a passive observer colored by several shades of green and blue reflected on her clothing, a symbol of her adaptability to that intransigent context. Her normality consists of watching movies, boiling the eggs she eats at lunch, preparing her tub to accomplish her daily masturbatory ritual, contemplating an inspirational phrase on her calendar, neatly cleaning her black shoes, longing for a pair of red shoes, and taking care of her neighbor Giles, a socially rejected gay man culturally forced to repress his emotions who sees himself as a relic for being old and misunderstood by his peers. Elisa’s life is changed when a humanoid amphibian creature arrives in the government laboratory where she works as a janitor. The creature is to be the focus of painful experiments; Elisa identifies with and begins to love him. The Shape of Water narrates the story of a group of socially and culturally neglected people whose physical and individual differences seem to marginalize them from the world but actually connect them through the one thing they have in common: their belonging to otherness. In the following excerpt, Elisa signs the dialogue, which Giles then interprets aloud.] ELISA: What am I? I move my mouth, like him. I make no sound, like him. What does that make me? All that I am, all that I’ve ever been, brought me here to him…. When he looks at me, the way he looks at me, he doesn’t know what I lack or how I am incomplete. He sees me for what I am as I am. He’s happy to see me every time, every day.