Shape of Water an odd twist to a classic story

Michael Shannon and Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water. Image courtesy Fox Searchlight.

 

In less capable hands, The Shape of Water could come dangerously close to being unwatchable. A blend of four genres telling an utterly bizarre love story with many grotesque details, the movie lives right along a number of thin lines that would tip it into being completely unwatchable, a pretentious art house movie that fails to blend the works of Davids Cronenberg and Lynch. Director Guillermo del Toro, who wrote the movie with Vanessa Taylor, is brilliant enough to use the oddity of his premise as a means of telling a basic love story between two fragile beings. What results is one of the sweetest, most charming love stories of the past decade.

There has always been something strangely benign about the supernatural beings that lurk just outside the real world in del Toro's movies. Ghosts are tragic creatures whose intents are benevolent to heroes and malevolent to the villains, and mythological gods provide aid and assistance for the protagonist's quest toward self discovery. The Shape of Water inserts the supernatural being into the center of the story, having a strange merman creature (played by Doug Jones) start an odd relationship with mute cleaner Elisa (Sally Hawkins). Elisa and the creature grow more and more in love and who receive aid from gay copy artist Giles (Richard Jenkins), Elisa's very reliable and understanding friend Zelda (Octavia Spencer), and Michael Stuhlbarg's mysterious scientist Dr. Robert Hoffstetler, as they fend off the very dangerous Strickland (a typically intense Michael Shannon). The cross between the fantastical and the normal is much more direct in this movie than some of del Toro's older, non-action movie titles, but the concept of a surprisingly ordinary abnormal supernatural presence fits with his modus operandi. Yet even those other movies come nowhere close to being quite as brazenly weird as The Shape of Water. It remains difficult to reconcile the romance between Elisa and the merman given the physiological differences and just how intimate their love becomes. It's not entirely unusual for a movie to create an emotional bond that toes the line at a physical relationship, but The Shape of Water goes right over that line and shows how close their relationship has become.

Their relationship might not be the strangest part of The Shape of Water. What's really disconcerting, aside the unfortunate fate of an unlucky cat, is the multitude of genres thrown together for this film. The Shape of Water is a fantastical love story, with elements of a Cold War spy movie and an era piece that digs under the artificial happiness of the early 1960s. As characters, Zelda and Giles could fit in just as well, if not better, in supporting roles in a romantic comedy, there to support the female lead as she pines for the dreamy captain of the high school swim team. Del Toro and Taylor even toss in elements of musicals, including a lovely and heartbreaking musical number that shines through Elisa's imagination.

None of it is overly distracting though because The Shape of Water's attention is focused on the relationship between Elisa and the merman. It's a beautiful romance, told quietly through kind acts and courageous feats. Everything between Elisa and the merman is driven by love and devotion, an unspoken romance that never strays into being sappy or saccharine. Every tender look, every embrace is earned because of how well Hawkins and Jones connect their characters. The other elements are there to elevate the romance, adding the necessary complications to move the story forward while adding a dreamy, nostalgia-tinged element to the film.

Nothing about tale told by The Shape of Water is overly complicated. To quote another movie about a woman and a beast falling in love, this is a tale as old as time about two beings who are exactly right for each other despite the circumstances around them. What's different is the lens used by del Toro and Taylor to tell this tale, to provide their unique take at how far true love can stretch physical impossibilities. Del Toro and Taylor have taken a banal plot and turned it into an indelible, beautiful love story about two incomplete beings completing each other and finding love in an otherwise hopeless place.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 123 minutes

Genre: Drama

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Target audience: Romantics with a sense of the macabre, so anyone who likes Guillermo del Toro movies.

Take the whole family?: No for several reasons.

Theater or Netflix?: This would make for a pretty interesting date night event.

Academy Award odds?: I hope this gets a Best Picture nomination, although it wouldn't be too surprising if this was snubbed because of how weird it is. At the least Sally Hawkins deserves a nomination for her quiet brilliance.

Watch this as well?: Guillermo del Toro's backlog is unique and often excellent, highlighted by The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth. The Shape of Water also has hints of Pedro Almodóvar, so check out the very fun but slightly supernatural Volver.

Bye Bye Man lacks scares, logic

Douglas Smith in The Bye Bye Man. Image courtesy STX Entertainment

Sometimes all a person can do is sit back and admire a movie as awesomely dumb as The Bye Bye Man, which at least proves even bad horror movies offer some entertainment value. Because, really, that's all this movie has going for it; any ambition to succeed as a piece of horror ends up unfulfilled from the title onward, left to better actors and more talented filmmakers.

Let's talk about that title for a second though. The title doubles as the name of the character haunting the three way-too old college students (played with little skill by Douglas Smith, Lucien Laviscount and Cressida Bonas) who move away from the dorms to a decrepit house in the woods. Astoundingly, multiple decision makers decided the phrase bye bye man was not only a good idea for the name of a supernatural entity – one whose name alone is enough to drive people into violent insanity, according to the script – but of the product being released for mass consumption. People are paid a lot of money to prevent movies from being titled The Bye Bye Man, and yet it now exists to linger in the dregs of horror moviedom, floating toward the bottom of the Netflix scroll for eternity.

So why call the villain Bye Bye Man anyway? Bye Bye Man never deigns to explain how the black-hooded being earned such a moniker or its origins in the first place. That's not a requirement for horror films to have, but for a movie that already pads its run time out with silly divergences and fattened scenes actually having a proper mystery for the characters to solve would offer a more organic and logical route for the script to take. The hunt the film does offer results in no helpful information to the characters, which is either a point toward the inherent existential futility of staving off death or poor writing. Occam's razor points toward the latter.

For the record, the movie doesn’t make the name work as an invocation for fear. It also doesn’t have the titular entity (played by Doug Jones) do anything either. Sure, the guy creeps around in a black hooded cloak and points at Smith's face in the cliché horror style, but his evil doesn't extend much beyond raising his fingers and staring ominously. The Bye Bye Man offers the deistic villain who sort of inspires bad things but is never shown actively participating in the bad things that arise in his wake. He and his poorly digitized hellhound are more like vultures than anything, giving the humans the hard work before they swoop in and pluck out a few eyeballs for show. The Bye Bye Man is sort of like Freddy Krueger, if Krueger lacked motivation, guile, ingenuity, charisma, and a sense of humor, among other attributes. His lack of involvement in the proceedings makes him less captivating as a nightmare figure. If you're going to show the evil, at least have it do something evil besides stalk unenthusiastically.

The one quasi-redeeming factor about The Bye Bye Man is how seriously the filmmakers, director Stacy Title and writer Jonathan Penner (who, per IMDB, are spouses) take the events depicted in this film. Little to no hilarity is intentional, and the actors follow along for the ride, aside from the screen consuming cameo by Faye Dunaway (although the other too good for this movie actress, Carrie-Anne Moss, plays it straight). It is the one saving grace to this very bad film, because Penner's dialog devolves into proper hilarity when the occasion arises. (One line in particular, involving a father comforting his daughter about the fate of her dead uncle, really needs to be seen on YouTube.) The film is loaded with many unnatural lines containing a lot of inane craziness delivered by people who are committed to this terrible experiment in horror that it at least offers a few chuckles to pass the time. Really, Penner's script might be the best worst part of Bye Bye Man, as the dude makes some really, really weird choices like having a young child attend a drunken college party and the entire scene involving Dunaway. The script doesn't reach bad-good status, but it is about as entertaining as Bye Bye Man gets.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 96 minutes

Genre: Horror

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Target audience: Horror fans and anyone looking to waste money.

Take the whole family?: This would still cause some problems for younger kids, but keeping it within three years of the PG-13 recommendation is fine.

Theater or Netflix?: Just avoid it.

Did this film ever stand a chance?: Not really given the early January release date. This is the dumping ground for bad movies, especially bad horror films, in which the studios hope a lack of better options can boost box office returns. This strategy has worked in the past – Paul Blart somehow made more than $100 million – but finding a decent film this time of year is like finding a pin in a pile of rotting fruit; it's in there somewhere, but the effort to find it just isn't worth it.

Watch this instead?: Nightmare on Elm Street greatly succeeds at everything Bye Bye Man flails at. Also always worth a watch are Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2, which do the creepy house thing better than Bye Bye Man.