Director: Guillermo del Toro

Starring: Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Octavia Spencer

Runtime: 123 minutes

Four stars

GUILLERMO del Toro’s picture heads for Oscar night on March 4 with a remarkable 13 nominations to its name, only one shy of the record set by La La Land, Titanic and All About Eve. Anyone would think that Hollywood, having endured a grubby year off screen, was seeking comfort and refuge in a romantic fantasy about the beauty of innocence and the power of love.

Yet it would be doing a disservice to The Shape of Water to categorise it as a passing fancy. Gorgeously realised, with soaring performances at its big, beating heart, del Toro’s picture would be a treat in any year. Its determined oddness may put some off, and it will not sway audiences in anything like the numbers achieved by its watery companion, Titanic. But this is by far the Mexican director’s finest film since Pan’s Labyrinth in 2006.

One of the baker’s dozen of nominations belongs to British actress Sally Hawkins who plays Elisa Esposito, a cleaner at a secret research facility in Baltimore in the early 1960s. Orphaned Elisa, who is mute, has found a family in her friends. Zelda (Octavia Spencer) stands up for her at work and Giles (Richard Jenkins, with Spencer, also Oscar-nominated), her neighbour, shares her love of old movies, especially the dance routines. Both Zelda, a black woman, and Giles, a gay man, are, like Elisa, outsiders looking in on an America that reckons its biggest problem is how to beat the Russians to the moon.

Elisa and Zelda have no idea what goes on behind the doors closed in their faces by the men from the military, but they do know there has been a lot of screaming of late, and that the shrieking has coincided with the arrival of Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), a brute who likes to speak softly and carry a cattle prod.

Called in to clean up after one of Strickland’s sessions, Elisa discovers the identity of the facility’s latest reluctant guest. Half man, half amphibian, the creature from the Amazon who can breathe in different environments has been captured by the Americans to help them win the space race. The Russians want to get their hands on him for the same reason.

To Strickland, the thing in the tank is an affront to nature; to Elisa he is an object of pity, another friend in the making, and perhaps something more. “He sees me for what I am, as I am,” she tells Giles. But how can true love find a way in the face of fear, prejudice and greed?

Therein lies the heart of the tale written by del Toro and Vanessa Taylor (Jack & Bobby, Game of Thrones). Like the creature, their story is a bit of this and a bit of that, part old fashioned race against the clock thriller, part creature feature, part romantic melodrama, with a salute to Spielberg’s ET thrown in along the way. Such a jumble of elements could have ended up a mess, but as he showed in Pan’s Labyrinth, no director can pass back and forth through the looking glass, from reality to fantasy, with quite the same aplomb as del Toro.

It helps enormously that he has created a world that is strange and beautiful yet instantly recognisable. This is Cold War America, with the cars and the clothes, yet it is not done in the usual sunlit, bubblegum colours. Del Toro submerges everything in a sea of muted hues, greens and blues to the fore, as if everyone, not just the creature, is living under water, just waiting to come up for air.

Though the picture is careful to have a smile at the absurdity of the situation in which all concerned find themselves, it is not afraid to go for broke on the fantasy and romance fronts. All caution is ditched as del Toro and his cast hurtle towards the tale’s conclusion, giving the audience no time to think. It is the only way to play such a story. A more ponderous approach would let reality seep in, breaking the spell. The pace is such that one is amazed to find two hours have passed. When did you last say that of a film?

Such an out of the ordinary picture demands an unconventional heroine and del Toro could not have chosen better than Hawkins. Bird-like but lion-hearted, her Elisa is wholly believable and endlessly entrancing. Rather like the world del Toro has created for her, and us, to dip into, however briefly.