The Shape of Water
Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water was the opening film of the mini-festival Telluride at Dartmouth , and so I got to see it a few months before it will be released generally. I love del Toro's work — even when it falls flat for me ( Crimson Peak ), it's nonetheless clearly the work of someone with his own vision and style. And when I am on the same wavelength as the film ( The Devil's Backbone , Pan's Labyrinth , Pacific Rim ), the experience is overwhelmingly beautiful and moving. Indeed, that for me is the hallmark of del Toro at his best: real, unbridled emotion coupled with a visual imagination that is lushly inventive, and a sense for color the equal of any other director today. Del Toro is also a master melodramatist, a common form not frequently mastered. In that sense, he's our Douglas Sirk , but without Sirk's irony. (Perhaps we could say that del Toro replaces Sirk's irony with fantasy: melding a classical sense of melodrama with ...
