The film packs the kind of whimsy and brutality that we've come to expect from del Toro, but also adds a sexual aspect that can't be fully realized from the trailer. Within the first 5 minutes, directly after meeting Eliza, we see her strip down, get in the tub and proceed to pleasure herself. It feels very left field, along with the film's physical relationship between Eliza and the Amphibian Man, which isn't wholly vital to the story and would've worked just as well without it. However, as creature actor and frequent del Toro collaborator Doug Jones mentioned in an interview with IMDB, this was always del Toro's modus operandi. "The Creature from the Black Lagoon was one of [del Toro's] favorite Universal Monster ever, and he told me that he wanted this to be a movie where the monster actually gets the girl this time," Jones told the interviewer. "Because there was always a love that can't be [in films like] King Kong, Dracula, Frankenstein, or what have you, so this time he actually wanted to see that consummated."

And consummated it is. Not only do we get to see a bit of this consummation — nothing grossly explicit — but we also get a follow-up scene where Eliza mimes to Zelda how exactly everything is feasible anatomically. This may work for some moviegoers, but I never felt like I was able to buy into this romance between woman and fish, and I thought it reduced the film down to a more comical level in some respects. However, on a metaphorical level, their relationship also represents seeing past the differences others and loving them for who they are, which is an important message to send, especially in this day and age.