Guiller­mo del Toro’s The Shape of Water gets a won­drous first trailer

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:

“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.

LWLies 107: The Sin­ners issue – Out now!