Elisa, a young silent woman, works in a scientific laboratory in Baltimore where the Americans fight the cold war. Employed as a cleaning lady, Elisa is bound by a deep friendship with Zelda, an African-American colleague who fights for her rights in marriage and society, and Giles, a homosexual neighbor, discriminated against at work. Several in a world of reassuring monsters, they discover that an amphibious creature of great intelligence and sensitivity lives in the laboratory (above). To reveal them is Elisa. Condemned to silence and solitude, he falls in love with that mystery capable of living between water and air. But their feeling will soon have to deal with a hostile hierarchy embodied by the despotic Strickland. In full blast to the Russians, the United States does not care about spending and cruelty. To guarantee and guarantee his country a stellar future, Strickland is determined to do everything.
If some of them probe what is played today in the depths of the depths, others draw an ancestral mythology and a new restlessness. Architect of nightmares, Guillermo del Toro enrolled in the second category, renewing the affinities, humid and furious, that human beings entertain with the marine world. Suspended between earthly neurosis (the Cold War and the irreducible fear of the different) and aquatic iridescence, The Shape of Water invents a new continent under our eyes, between sea and earth, averting the drowning with the power of ghosts.
Continuing his relationship with the extraordinary, the author advances in History and produces a subtle articulation, but without metaphorical gravity, between reality and double phantasmagoric that explains his obscure mechanisms. Precipitated in the middle of the Cold War, the story acts on two levels, that of the realist chronicle (the violence of history) and that of the mythological imaginary (the encounter with the extraordinary creature), and observes two movements, those on which it is tenaciously balanced the author's cinema.
The Shape of Water
Original title: The Shape of Water
Original language: English, Russian, ASL
Country of production: United States of America
Year: 2017
Duration: 123 min
Report: 1.85:1
Genre: Phantastic, sentimental, adventure, dramatic gender
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Subject: Guillermo del Toro
Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro, Vanessa Taylor
Producer: Guillermo del Toro, J. Miles Dale
Executive Producer: Liz Sayre
Home Production: Bull Productions, Fox Searchlight Pictures, TSG Entertainment, Double Dare You Productions
Distribution (Italy): 20th Century Fox
Photography: Dan Laustsen
Editing: Sidney Wolinsky
Music: Alexandre Desplat
Scenography: Paul D. Austerberry
Costumes: Luis Sequeira
Makeup: Kristin Wayne
Interpreters and characters
Sally Hawkins: Elisa Esposito
Michael Shannon: col. Richard Strickland
Richard Jenkins: Giles
Doug Jones: amphibious man
Michael Stuhlbarg: dott. Robert 'Bob' Hoffstetler / Dimitri
Octavia Spencer: Zelda Delilah Fuller
Nick Searcy: gen. Frank Hoyt
David Hewlett: Fleming
Lauren Lee Smith: Elaine Strickland
Morgan Kelly: cake man
Stewart Arnott: Bernard
Nigel Bennett: Mihalkov
Martin Roach: Brewster Fuller
John Kapelos: Arzoumanian
Jayden Greig: Timmy Strickland
Brandon McKnight: Duane
Italian voice actors
Pino Insegno: col. Richard Strickland
Franco Zucca: Giles
Loris Loddi: dott. Robert 'Bob' Hoffstetler / Dimitri
Cinzia De Carolis: Zelda Delilah Fuller
Franco Mannella: Fleming
Eleonora De Angelis: Elaine Strickland
Roberto Gammino: man of the cake
Luca Biagini: Bernard
Roberto Fidecaro: Mihalkov
Simone Mori: Brewster Fuller
Angelo Nicotra: Arzoumanian
Giulio Bartolomei: Timmy Strickland
Fabrizio De Flaviis: Duane
