“Speaks to the moment” is a phrase film journalists have found themselves writing a lot in 2017, whether discussing the blockbuster patriarchy-smashing of Wonder Woman, the socially needling sleeper success of Get Out or the corrosive middle-American pressure-cooker of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. As many column inches have been spilled on such films’ individual merits as on what they mean: how they reflect current society, and what the public’s response reflects back at them. When even a film as outwardly feathery and innocuous as Paddington 2 has inspired thinkpieces about its anti-Brexit subtext, you know we’ve hit a tough time for pure escapism.

The Shape of Water review – Guillermo del Toro's fantasy has monster-sized heart Read more

What, then, of Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water? The Mexican auteur’s extravagant period fantasy must surely count as the most outlandish prestige film of the upcoming holiday season: a sensually detailed interspecies romance between a woman and an unclassifiable aquatic creature, improbably melded with a government conspiracy thriller, it has inspired critical comparisons to the fanciful visions of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and even Powell and Pressburger, though it finally exists very much in its own strange, sweet dimension.

Yet since it wowed the crowds at the Venice Film Festival in September – and dazzled Annette Bening’s jury into handing it the Golden Lion – The Shape of Water has made a quiet approach in a season dominated by films speaking, or even shouting, to the moment. As the Oscar race slowly begins to take shape, there’s much talk of prime contenders building a topical “narrative” to fuel their campaigns: Three Billboards is being pitched as a spiky response to the culture of toxic masculinity exemplified by Harvey Weinstein; on a related note, Lady Bird and Greta Gerwig carry heightened hopes for another female best director winner; Get Out continues to mark the temperature of America’s rampant racial tensions; Call Me By Your Name takes the baton of LGBT empowerment and visibility from reigning Oscar champ Moonlight.

That kind of conversation hasn’t really been driving The Shape of Water, even if it’s been tipped for awards attention since its first unveiling – as an inventive, heart-stirring crowdpleaser marked by gorgeous craftsmanship and distinguished ensemble acting. When it prominently failed to show up on the nomination lists for the season’s earliest precursors, the Gotham Awards and the Independent Spirits, pundits speculated that Del Toro’s delirious fantasy perhaps didn’t feel relevant enough, charged enough, now enough for voters out to make a statement: to what precise moment does a darkly romantic adult fairytale laced with tasteful merman sex speak, anyway?

Take a closer look at The Shape of Water, however, and its florid whimsy subsides into a stark, clear and eminently contemporary human parable, streaked with fury against traditional hierarchies of power in America. It’s a film that rousingly, none-too-subtly champions marginalised minorities and outsiders, and regards conservative masculine authority with a jaundiced eye – at one point delivering, as teased in the film’s own trailer, a very literal “fuck you” to The Man. Its politics are not volatile or contentious, but its live-and-let-live message couldn’t be purer.

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Most of the film’s characters amount to a rogue’s gallery of people who have been disenfranchised or sidelined from mainstream society in early 1960s America, many of whom might find themselves similarly on the fringes in 2017. Mute cleaning lady Eliza (played with soulful defiance by Sally Hawkins) is both the protagonist and plainest symbolic embodiment of this isolation. We’re never filled in on the backstory behind her speechlessness; for much of the film, it’s unclear whether she’s disabled or voluntarily silent. Either way, the absence of her voice is pointed: an extreme handicapping of a perspective that, given her gender, class and occupation, the power that be would be unlikely to hear anyway.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Richard Jenkins and Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water. Photograph: Kerry Hayes

Eliza’s closest allies lurk likewise in the social shadows. Giles (Richard Jenkins), her neighbour and closest confidant, is a closeted gay man, aching for romantic companionship but provided with no outlet to find it. Zelda (Octavia Spencer), her colleague and protector at the high-security government lab where she works, is an African American woman, brash and comfortable in her own skin but underestimated or ignored by men, from her office superiors to her own detached husband.

None of these characters, meanwhile, is disempowered or abused quite as egregiously as Eliza’s unlikely, non-human object of desire: a fish-man hybrid kidnapped from the Amazon by the government for purposes of scientific experimentation, only for his extermination to be ordered by Michael Shannon’s embittered, power-tripping federal agent. Del Toro and Vanessa Taylor’s script seems light on motivation in this regard until you see the character himself is emptily driven by mere wariness of difference. As the film tips into elaborate heist territory, with Hawkins and her fellow misfits conspiring to rescue the creature from governmental confinement, all its more intricate narrative complications coalesce into a more elemental standoff of Straight White Man – as distilled in Shannon’s increasingly deranged one-man army – against a surging world of Other.

As political allegories go, The Shape of Water isn’t notably sophisticated or specific: some might argue that it errs slightly by itself othering the non-human creature in question (named only as Amphibian Man) by denying him any silent perspective on proceedings. But the sheer simplicity of its alignment with the underdog is its rather special magic, while it’s still porous to other, more transgressive interpretations and identifications. It was Vanity Fair critic Richard Lawson who first described the film as tacitly queer, and indeed it’s hard not to detect a love-is-love sentiment – an advocacy of non-standard sexual curiosity, and tolerance of same – in its offbeat underwater love story. It’s not as explicitly spiky or angry as other socially conscious standouts on the 2017 film calendar, but Del Toro’s film sees its moment nonetheless, and sings soaringly to it.