Dir: Guillermo del Toro; Starring: Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Doug Jones, Octavia Spencer, Michael Stuhlbarg. Cert 15, 119 mins

Guillermo del Toro’s films are often as sensuously contorted as the beasts that lurk within them, but his latest is a pretzel-twist of pure strangeness, even by his standards. The Shape of Water is the story of a human woman who has an illicit love affair with a swamp monster, and is played with all the swoony sincerity of a classic thwarted romance.

A Golden Lion winner at Venice last year, and now in the running for 12 Baftas and 13 Oscars, it’s both an honest-to-God B-movie blood-curdler and a boundlessly beautiful melodrama: think Creature from the Black Lagoon directed by Douglas Sirk.

Which is to say, it is del Toro through and through. This is not, let’s be frank, a premise that would sprout from many places other than the dank and loamy mind behind Pan’s Labyrinth and Crimson Peak. But the combination works. The setting is postwar USA, with the Civil Rights movement and the threat of Soviet supremacy bubbling in the background. The future is right at hand, yet no-one seems too certain of their place in it.