That pinging you hear is the sound of Guillermo del Toro’s forthcoming sci-fi fable, The Shape of Water, launching to the very top of our unofficial ‘Most Anticipated Movies’ list. On the back of this mesmerising first trailer, it looks like Mexico’s foremost screen fabulist has made another completely idiosyncratic monster movie which embraces cinematic innovation and cutting edge design while keeping more than a toe in the ravishing melodrama of the classic era.
It looks a little like Amélie meets Hellboy, with the great Sally Hawkins in what looks to be a peach of a role as a mute floor cleaner who builds a connection with some kind of aquatic humanoid, played by Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth star Doug Jones (who is to fish-men what Andy Serkis is to monkeys). Speaking to Collider earlier this year, Jones has this to say about his role in the project:
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“It’s not a sci-fi [film], it’s not a genre film, but I am a creature in it. I’m a fish man that’s kind of a one-off. I’m an enigma, nobody knows where I came from; I’m the last of my species so I’m like a natural anomaly. And I’m being studied and tested in a US government facility in 1963, so the Russian Cold War is on, the race for space is on, so there’s all that backdrop and that undercurrent.”
Bung in Michael Shannon as an evil science officer and big themes about our connection to the natural world – plus some extraordinary production design – and you can just go ahead and colour us very exited.
The Shape of Water is released on 8 December, 2017 in the US and 25 February, 2018 in the UK.
