MEXICO CITY — In 1960s America, a cleaning woman who can’t speak and lives next door to a gay artist falls in love with a humanoid sea creature held in a government lab for Cold War experiments. It sounds like a pitch that would make Hollywood producers screw up their faces and scream, “Next!” But the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro not only procured a $19.5 million budget for “The Shape of Water” but also made it into a commercial and critical success, in the running for 13 prizes at the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday.

If Mr. del Toro wins the best director award at the Oscars, it will be the fourth time a filmmaker from Mexico has taken the prize in five years, all with unconventional films. Alejandro G. Iñárritu won in 2015 for “Birdman,” the bizarrely hilarious tale of an aging superhero actor trying to get serious on Broadway, and he did it again in 2016 with “The Revenant,” a radically different western focused on a quest for revenge in subzero temperatures. Alfonso Cuarón triumphed in 2014 with “Gravity,” a sci-fi story that many said was impossible to make, before it made over $723 million at the worldwide box office.

Referred to as “The Three Amigos,” the title of a book about their transnational cinema, these directors are not the only Mexican filmmakers who have won recent accolades in Hollywood. There is also the cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who has three Oscars; Rodrigo Prieto, who shot “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “Argo” and “Brokeback Mountain”; and another Oscar winner, the production designer Eugenio Caballero.

The Amigos’ success shows the strength of an artistic circle; they are longtime friends who have encouraged one another to take risks. They began making their films when the Mexican industry was at a low in the 1980s, dominated by raunchy movies about escort bars and overshadowed by telenovela soaps. The Amigos bucked the trend with dark stories about H.I.V., inner-city dogfights and historic horrors.