Review: THE SHAPE OF WATER

Guillermo Del Toro never seems to mind if you guess the end of his movies. He's a storyteller who is more about the travel than the arrival at port. So when you see the bad guy you don't just assure yourself of his likely end you begin to savour getting to know his darkness and his violence before that happens. And when the credit sequence travels through an old apartment underwater and we see our heroine gently descending to the couch where she will wake in a few moments we have almost all the information on her as well. We also know we want to follow her around.

So we do. Elisa is mute but not deaf and cleans at a nightmarish industrial research complex. It's the cold war and you don't want to know what they're doing in there. Well, unlike you, Elisa is curious and often needs the maternal wrangling of her friend Zelda to keep her out of trouble. One day she touches a grim looking metal capsule with windows and jumps back as a hand darts to the glass from inside. She is observed by the head of security, a bipedal contained volcano played by bipedal contained volcano Michael Shannon. He's curious, too. About Elisa, though, he already knows what he wants done with the thing in the capsule.

And Elisa? She is lonely and alien from almost all the people she meets in this world. She is happy to learn the dance steps from oldie movies on tv that her paternally older neighbour shows her while the cinema below her apartment shows cheddar-lite toga epics in Technicolor. Her simple mien masks a deep forlornness she has learned to live with. But here is a creature even more alien but strangely kindred. He responds to kindness and music and learns her sign language without effort. In her world it seems just her luck to be so magnetically drawn to a the creature from the black lagoon. But all she registers is joy. 

There's a lot of plot to go with this and you can see that for yourselves. Again, the joy Del Toro offers is in the travel. And what a carriage he invites us to. He has long struck his own flag in the same style continent as Terry Gilliam, Jeunet and Caro and Tim Burton and his films always give us gorgeous worlds where even the ghastly and the terrifying have a clear appeal. Elisa's apartment is all rich wood panels and vintage for the era. In contrast, the American dream home that Strickland rules over like a Don Draper trogladyte is all Sears Catalogue, too new to be dirty, murmuring with old tv shows and covert sex. It's the same world that's squeezing Giles and his meticulous artwork out of his profession. He, too, is alien. When we discover why his fridge is filled with slices of indigestible assembly line pie slices, we see a spark flash up from the collision of it. But that spark is a bad one, ill tasting and poisonous. 

And between these conflicting worlds lies the fable. If you are tempted to think of a retelling of Beauty and the Beast you're getting close but there's a lot more on the table. First, this is a grown ups version. Remember the masturbation at the start? There's much more on that level of candour. Strickland's sexual predation is both fearsome and timely. This is not only intended exclusively for an adult audience it feels as though Del Toro has accepted this side of his mythmaking more gravely than in Pan's Labyrinth. The bad guy in that was already marked by being a Falangist monster. He wasn't going to get an ethical lift at any point. We don't expect this of Strickland, either, but we do get deeper into his thinking. We don't hate the snake for biting but our caution at the sight of it is the lesson. Strickland is as much corporate man as he is aparatchik. On the right side, he's the good guy. A late dialogue with his military boss reveals as much about his place in the order as it does about his motives. Michael Shannon (who has only disappointed me in the strained cuteness of Pottersville but everybody else did, too) delivers a constantly threatening force to his character. His craft has the same artisanal finish as Giles's painted ad.

Finally, there is the central pair. Sally Hawkins commands us without speaking a word through almost every scene in the film, drawing us into her alienation and membrane of cope. Doug Jones as the unnamed creature has an equally difficult task as a performance from within a suit (Del Toro, tellingly, chose an elaborate costume over pure mocap and CGI). His performance, for all of its detail, is doomed to be qualified as being against the odds of disguise. Nevertheless, his physicality is there on screen, athletic and balletic, genuine.

Del Toro has served us another adult fairy tale, this time with the extra flavour of his experience with his own vision and how to work that within the larger industrial system (more than a little of what we see on screen feels like his own commentary on this). He was notable as being among the one for them and one for me auteurs. That Shape of Water lifts the game from the misstep of Crimson Peak so very high that the pressure (with added Oscar murmurs) must feel intense. I cannot wait for his next.

Review: CRIMSON PEAK

So, it's a ghost story.

It's more a story with ghosts.

Edith explains this more than once in the opening scenes of Crimson Peak. She's writing a novel. Already she's been told to put a romance in it and then she has decided to conceal her gender from publishers by drafting the book on a typewriter. And behind her, writer director Guillermo del Toro is telling us that we should cast off ideas that we're in for a horror movie. It's not a clumsy breach of the fourth wall as much as a kind of wink to anyone who has followed his career. So far he's made popcorn genre films in English and highly original dark fables in Spanish. Well, this is a dark fable in English.

There are indeed ghosts. They are fleshy but also ashen. Trails and dribbles of ectoplasm flow around them like the spectres in The Devil's Backbone. They are scary when you see them but they are also messengers. What's on show here is not horror but melodrama and it is played as a kind of spoken opera. The grand orchestral score for once in a contemporary film really has a welcome place. Edith's insistence on the relationship of ghosts to the story plays, in effect, like a theme in an overture.

The plot is a compound of gothic melodramas like Jane Eyre or Rebecca. Young and beautiful and Edith (a golden Mia Wasikovska) falls for the suavely dark Sir Thomas Thorne (the utterly dependable Tom Hiddleston) as he tours the Americas seeking investors for his clay mining machine. His sister, the arch and sinister Lady Lucille (a posh accented Jessica Chastain) slinks through the society crowd like a crimson serpent and descends a gothic stairwell like seven Mrs Danvers all at once. We're not talking new, here, as much as well expressed.

As a child, Edith was warned by the ghost of her mother to beware of Crimson Peak. And it is to a crimson peak (a natural phenomenon explained in the second act) that she is drawn. The mansion is slowly sinking into the blood red clay. The ceilings in some rooms have caved in; snow falls gently through the holes. Corridors give way to more corridors. The basement, accessed by an ancient lift, is filled with vats of bloodlike clay that could hide many bodies. And the cupboards and the recesses, the bathtubs and the entrances crawl and slide with the blood red dead.

Edith runs through this increasingly grave life decision like a gothic heroine. Well, she would if she weren't written as she has been. While she is under constant threat, at first from the ghosts and then from her sister in law and even her new husband she is more of an action heroine. And it is this that lifts Crimson Peak from being a beautiful but pointless melodrama to a Guillermo del Toro film.

Mia Wasikovska's bright performance goes from naivete to hard, canny survivalism as the full picture of where the real threats are coming from. Without this element, character and performance, the film would be pedestrian, if spectacularly so, on the same shelf as almost everything by Tim Burton after Ed Wood. Until this role solidifies it can be difficult to see where del Toro is going with the material but as blasting mini opera about life's mistakes it takes an honourable place beside the Spanish speaking masterworks. Perhaps a little softer than Pan's Labyrinth, which might well disappoint, but this could be the mellowing maturity brings and that might well spell more depth. We shall wait. We shall see.

Review: MAMA: pushing the Del Toro button, the wrong one

Morning. Two angelic little girls at home. Their father bursts in and tells them to get ready. There is enough dishevelment around his bourgeois suityness for us to declare him insane and see what he's about to do. The girls' mother is nowhere to be seen or heard. We have already heard some radio reports of a crime and can now attribute it to crazy white collar dad who is now careening along a snowy road with his kids in the back. One innocently distracts him and the car spins and crashes in the icy forest below the road. Emerging from the wreckage the trio find a cabin nearby where they take shelter. Someone seems to already be there but we only see the vaguest glimpse of them. As Dad is going through the house his a pistol summoning the courage to put a bullet through his brain one of the girls says: "Daddy, there's a woman outside. Her feet aren't touching the floor."

At that second I thought: ok, assembly line horror but there's a shivery treat. And then BOO! the scene ends in a shock you know is coming. Credit sequence is a series of stock eerie children's drawings but there is also a name: Guillermo Del Toro. The great fabulist who rose in the nineties to show us how genre films don't have to be so ... generic. Right, I think, there'll be something worth watching here in all the standardised cine-decor.

Well, there is and there isn't.

The girls are discovered years later as scary looking ferals who move like the spider walk scene in the bloated recut of the Exorcist. They are reassimilated and join their uncle (who sent himself broke searching for them) and his girlfriend (a neogothed Jessica Chastain) and through a series of stock legal and psychiatric plot points the new ersatz family are settled in a large house outside their social spheres. Uncle Lucas and girlfriend Annabel meet the girls as they are delivered to their new home.

The younger of the two children hides behind her sister and whispers, "Mama." Annabel thinks Lilly is claiming her as a mother and is quick to  dismiss the notion. But we and the girls know different. It means that the woman from the cabin scene whose feet didn't touch the ground is going to be turning up and that Annabel, rock 'n' roller and self-centred narcissist is going to learn love and responsibility. From the opening, also we know that most of the horror of what we are to see will be a series of BOO! type scares and very little slowburning dread.

Horror from an assembly line, in other words. But is there anything of the Del Toro touch in this protege piece? Del Toro saw and admired director Muschetti's short film and engineered its transition from Youtube to the big screens o' the world. This happened a few times, particularly in Spain where young filmmakers, working on Del Toro and Amanebar's films and get to sit in the chair and call the shots. A really good result of this is Hierro, cruelly undersung slowfuse emotional thriller from a few years back. The idea that the seasoned masters' could keep the tyro from falling into cliche and blandness is an enticing one.

So why is Mama so unwaveringly cheesey? There are genuine scares and the atmosphere is maintained throughout but the amount of calculation boosting the effort spoils everything. The production values are Hollywood high and the orchestral score is bigger than a city block. Was this really the newcomer wanting this upgrade to everything? Upping the effects and score and fleshing out the tale so that the back story is present and unignorable? Maybe but I'm thinking that Del Toro himself was the one who came and poured the compounded popcorn butter on the project so that the short that I'll link to here ended up looking like overstuffed by-numbers guff like Insidious. Guillermo Del Toro whose best work never suffers from this but whose every Hollywood hack job is bursting with them was pumping up Muschetti's brilliant little short into a great bloated multiplex monster. I wonder, if Muschetti had insisted on making a Spanish language film (see the short for this) would GDT not have nurtured something a little more starkly original?