YMMV / The Shape of Water

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Was the pie shop owner really straight and homophobic? Or was he a closeted homosexual who hated who he was inside? And was he truly racist or just saw an opportunity to give Giles more incentive to go away and drive the rejection home?
  • Did the Asset give Elisa her gills, or were the gills there the entire time and nobody ever realized? This of course assumes that Giles wasn't just making it all up for the sake of a happy ending. The tie in novel written by Del Toro confirms that Elisa was found by a harbour as a baby with the marks and the last chapter explains she was born with the gills, as she was the same species as the Asset and the ending was not just from Giles' hopes, but what truly happened. They earned their happy ending.
  • In one of their final meals together, the Asset happily signs 'egg' to Elisa, to which she responds with the 'You'll Never Know' sequence. We see her struggle to finish saying the statement 'You'll never know just how much I care' but only signs the first part, 'You'll Never Know,' to which the Asset snarls and squirms with despair. Was the Asset merely cheerfully referencing the way they met, but was saddened by their inevitable parting? Or, considering that they had been regularly lovemaking for an untold amount of time, was the Asset asking about the possibility that they had sired offspring, to which he was told: 'You'll never know.'
  • Flawed as he was, Zelda's husband: did he really not care about her and Elisa's friendship at all since he readily gave up the whereabouts of the Asset, or was he thinking that, being an African American couple, it would be better if he complied with the clearly psychotic Angry White Man who held considerable power in a time of legalized racial segregation and oppression? He only speaks up when Strickland's on the verge of hurting Zelda to make her talk, and despite knowing about their theft of the Asset for some time prior, keeps it to himself.
• Applicability: The film is about a group of characters, all from marginalized groups — a disabled woman, a black woman, a gay man, and a foreign spy who has been having second thoughts — fighting against a villain who claims to be an all-American Good Ol' Boy but is really a homicidal psychopath, to protect a character that the villain feels deserves to die for being different. Many comparisons to the turbulent contemporary political landscape of the United States abound. Del Toro has mentioned one inspiration was his own experiences as a Mexican in America, and how today immigrants are seen as "the other". Some have even suggested this to be a great companion piece to another critically acclaimed and socially relevant genre film, Get Out (2017), a film Guillermo Del Toro loved.
• Award Snub:
  • Many people accused the Academy of snubbing Doug Jones' spellbinding performance as the Asset for Best Actor, selling the hell out of a man in a fish costume as a romantic lead. What makes this even more unfair is that every other member of the main heroic ensemble was nominated ^note (Sally Hawkins, Richard Jenkins, and Octavia Spencer for Best Actress, Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress, respectively) except for the leading man. Some fans believed that, had Jones not been playing a fish-person, he would have gotten an automatic Best Actor nom.
  • Even more baffling was it not being nominated for Best Makeup despite the wonderfully expressive prosthetics for the Asset being central to the emotion of the story. And there were only three other films nominated in the makeup category! Michael Shannon was also overlooked by the Academy.
• Awesome Music: The dreamy, fairy tale-like soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat earned universal acclaim and a second Oscar for him.
• Best Known for the Fanservice:
  • As amazing and award-winning as this film is, it's probably going to have a hard time shrugging off its reputation as the movie where a woman has sex with a fish man.
  • Sally Hawkins' butt really left an impression in the minds of a lot of filmgoers. When it was revealed she would be appearing in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), jokes about her character wanting to fuck Godzilla quickly surfaced on the internet.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: While the "You'll Never Know" Imagine Spot is set up by Elisa's water dream and interest in old-time musical numbers, it's still a rather jarring departure from the tone of rest of the film and only serves to express Elisa's motivation rather than move the plot forward, so some viewers see it as an example of this trope.
• Catharsis Factor: The Asset ripping out Strickland's throat, after the latter shot Elisa, no less.
• Creepy Cute: The Asset. He wouldn’t be out of place in a Lovecraftian horror story, but damn it, if he isn't cute as hell.
• Designated Villain: During the Asset's breakout, Giles is caught and nearly arrested by a security guard. However, Dr. Hoffstetler arrives at the last minute and gives the guard a lethal injection. The scene is played up as a Big Damn Hero moment. Never mind the fact that the victim was an ordinary security guard who was Just Following Orders. Could also be seen as a case of Protagonist-Centered Morality. Then again, Giles himself was horrified at this action, it could be said to be a necessary evil in order to save the Asset, and presumably everyone else.
• Epileptic Trees: Thanks to the Asset's similar appearance and affinity for eating eggs, many are theorizing that the film is a Stealth Prequel to Hellboy, showing the origin of Abe Sapien.
• Fanfic Fuel: As Strickland points out, what would lead someone to perform surgery on a baby that made them mute? And was it related to Elisa's own possible connection to the Asset's species that lets her grow gills?
• Fan Nickname: Grinding Nemo, due to a highly touted sex scene between Elisa and the Asset.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Strickland keeps likening himself to Samson against the Philistines. In the Biblical story, Samson was chained by the Philistines in the temple of Dagon, who is often taken to be a fish god.
  • Strickland is seen reading The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale. One of the book's tips is to repeatedly remind yourself that you receive power from God and Christ, which fits Strickland's character perfectly.
  • Giles and Elisa watch the dance scene from The Little Colonel, where Shirley Temple dances with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. This was the first interracial dance on film. Later, the soundtrack plays "Babalu" by Desi Arnaz, one half of the first interracial couple on television. Both suggest an inversion of the Scary Black Man trope as represented in monster movies.
• He Really Can Act: Bet you never thought any actor could make a fishman believable as a romantic lead, did you? That's the talent of Doug Jones for you.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Building off the applicability, shortly after the film was released, Democrat Doug Jones defeated Republican Roy Moore, a judge who, much like Strickland, positioned himself as a moral crusader but who had long been dogged by rumors of pedophilia, for the Alabama Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, becoming Alabama's first Democratic Senator in over two decades.
  • Some have seen The Shape of Water as being a gender-flipped remake of Splash (which was released by Disney under the studio's Touchstone Pictures banner). The comparisons between the two films would become even more apt once Disney bought 20th Century Fox (the studio that made The Shape of Water) in 2018.^A Ironically, one of the many studios that producer Brian Grazer pitched his film Splash was 20th Century Fox. According to the book Storming the Magic Kingdom: Wall Street, the Raiders, and the Battle for Disney by John Taylor, the script was rejected by the studio’s senior vice-president of worldwide production Richard Berger due to concerns that the "extensive underwater scenes" would have made the film "prohibitively expensive".^BWhat's even more ironic is that Richard Berger would later get fired from 20th Century Fox to work at Disney in which he became president of Disney's "Touchstone Pictures" division. When Disney CEO and founder of Touchstone Pictures Ron Miller handed the screenplay of “Splash” to Richard in order to see if he would like it, Berger told Ron that he had already read it back at 20th Century Fox; however once Richard read the script, he ended up liking it, thanks to a rewrite done by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, which had significantly fewer underwater scenes than the original script written by Bruce Jay Friedman.
• Memetic Mutation: Plenty of jokes about sexual relations with fish have been made. Referenced by Jimmy Kimmel during the Oscars ceremony
  Jimmy Kimmel: Thanks to Guillermo, we will always remember this year, as the year men screwed up so badly, women started dating fish.
  • Once the movie came out, the internet had a field day in regards to preferring the fish-man over certain kinds of men.
  • Speculating about what exactly the Asset's sexual organs look like. Some fans even made their own prop of their idea, which del Toro said was completely off.
  • Referring to the movie as "Grinding Nemo".
• Moral Event Horizon: Strickland is hardly a good person at any point in the movie, but he really ups his villainous game when he tortures Dmitri/"Bob" to death.
• Narm:
  • The "You'll Never Know" sequence can come off as this, between the sudden musical number and the sight of the Asset waltzing around a Golden Age Hollywood movie set.
  • The scene in which Giles is rejected by the counter boy at the diner is heartbreaking, if predictable, but the way that this is followed up with the revelation that the counter boy is also appallingly racist seems almost a cartoonishly opportunistic demonstration of villainy. So Giles has enough pie from this place to fill his fridge but he had never seen how this kid treats minorities?
  • The Asset saying "You and me together" in sign language should have come across as a declaration of love, but considering Elisa used that same expression to proposition the Asset in an earlier scene, it seems like he's just asking for some nookie.
  • Cathartic though it may be Strickland's death can be unintentionally funny given Michael Shannon's surprisingly emotionless reading of, "Fuck. You are a god," seconds before getting his throat torn out. He just sounds tired more than anything.
• Narm Charm:
  • It's very easy to mock Elisa and the Asset's romance, especially when the film goes ahead and takes it to sexual levels. However, the love between the two is very sweet and charming enough to overlook this.
  • The "You'll Never Know" sequence. It's silly, it's corny, but it's completely in character for Elisa, and heartbreakingly sincere.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • Strickland's fingers that get bitten off and sewn back on never take and he walks around with two gangrenous, blackening fingers, one of which oozes pus at one point. He then rips them both off in front of Zelda in her house and even tosses them onto the floor.
  • When Strickland finds Dmitri with a bullet hole in his cheek, he hooks his fingers through it and drags him off, with the poor man moaning in pain, and proceeds to jam the bullet deeper into his gut in a crude attempt at torture.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Asset biting the head off of one of Giles’ cats is definitely wince-worthy.
  • Dimitri getting shot through the cheek, and then Strickland dragging him away by the cheek wound.
• Out of the Ghetto: Despite having strong fantasy elements, the film was nominated for 13 Academy Awards, and won Best Picture.
• Popular with Furries: The movie is an Interspecies Romance between a human woman and a fishmen, hits a lot of furry buttons.
• Sci Fi Ghetto: Many people were baffled that the film wasn't nominated for either Best Makeup (despite the amazing prosthetics for the Asset being essential to the film's plot) or Best Actor for Doug Jones, who had to do everything Sally Hawkins did (including, acting, swimming, and dancing) and still sell a believable leading man performance under 20 pounds of prosthetics for many hours a day, without even getting to have bathroom breaks. Many people suspected that the Academy's belief that prosthetic monster-suit performance is "not real acting" as the only reason Jones could possibly not have been nominated.
• Signature Scene:
  • When Elisa expresses her devotion to The Asset by having Giles speak what she signs.
  • Elisa flooding the bathroom to make love with The Asset underwater.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • Visually, its combination of The '60s aesthetics, music and time period, plus the water motifs, make you feel you're watching a BioShock movie adaptation.
  • Those who think that the Asset could related to the Cthulhu Mythos see this movie as the story of a captured Deep One finding love with a human hybrid who begins to transition into another Deep One in the end, the ending is even reminiscent of Dagon's, which was loosely based on The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
  • The film has frequently received comparisons to the Alexander Belyaev novel Amphibian Man and its 1962 film adaptation, to the point that some have accused the filmmakers of plagiarizing the earlier film.
• Squick: The interspecies romance may easily come across to some, given the fact that it's... well, an interspecies romance with a fish humanoid.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Zelda delivers a bitterly harsh rebuke to her husband for giving the psychotic Strickland the information he demands. He has no defense, slinking away in shame, and we're apparently supposed to sympathize only with Zelda even though her husband very well might have saved both of their lives.
• Viewer Name Confusion: Elisa’s name tends to get misspelled as Eliza Esposito by some people.
• The Woobie:
  • The Asset! Watching the poor thing get beaten to a bloody pulp on a daily basis For Science! will have you investing in antidepressants like there's no tomorrow.
  • Giles is a lonely closeted gay man in the 1960s who is unable to find work despite his talent and feels out of place in American society.

---