Sally Hawkins’ character in the Shape of Water may seem disempowered; but it’s the latest mute female lead to soar in awards season

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Women are finally being heard in this #MeToo moment, so it is ironic that one of this year’s best actress Oscar nominees plays a character who doesn’t say a word. Sally Hawkins, the mute heroine of The Shape of Water, steals the show making barely a sound. Looking back through movie and Oscars history, silence is often golden.

There are three types of movie mute. The first is the homage to the silent era. This worked for The Artist and Jean Dujardin, and clowns, from Mr Bean to Silent Bob.

The second is the genuinely mute character: Patty Duke won best supporting actress in 1963 for playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker; mostly silent Marlee Matlin won best actress for Children of a Lesser God in 1987; and the wordless Ukrainian drama The Tribe, set in a school for the deaf, took things to new extremes.

But the third, and most interesting category is the silent victim. Hawkins’s muteness speaks of her general disempowerment. She is exploited, manipulated and ignored – especially by men. It could have been worse. In 1948’s Johnny Belinda, Jane Wyman’s mute, orphaned farmgirl becomes pregnant after being raped, then her rapist kills her stepfather and tries to take her baby from her, then she is put on trial for murder. It was based on a true story. Wyman won a best actress Oscar for it.

It wasn’t quite so bad for Samantha Morton’s smiling, silent clown in Woody Allen’s 1999 Sweet and Lowdown. Sean Penn’s self-centred musician treats her like dirt, but she gets her revenge (and Morton got an Oscar nomination).

Jane Campion moved things on somewhat with The Piano. Holly Hunter (another Oscar-winner) plays another voiceless, disempowered woman. But Hunter’s Victorian mail-order bride is no victim. We get to hear her inner voice, and her silence ultimately becomes a gesture of defiance, seeing off Sam Neill’s attempts to rape her and Harvey Keitel’s attempts to own her.

It is not always women: let’s not forget Leonardo DiCaprio’s almost voiceless (and again, Oscar-winning) victim in The Revenant and Duncan Jones’s anticipated Netflix release Mute, with Alexander Skarsgård as a mute bartender.

Nor is Sally Hawkins the only mute in The Shape of Water. There is the humanoid fish-monster, himself. Incarcerated and considered subhuman, he’s in the same boat as her and belongs to a further category of movie mute: the misunderstood monster, whose lineage extends back through King Kong, Frankenstein’s monster and possibly Edward Scissorhands, all of whom generate sympathy with their silence. As Norma Desmond once said, lamenting the demise of silent movies: “We didn’t need dialogue, we had faces.” That’s still true today.

The Shape of Water is in cinemas from 14 February