The Shape Of Water really does bring new meaning to the phrase 'sleeping with the fishes'. I hate to sound bitter but it is a massive slap in the face when even a fucking swamp-monster manages to pull with more ease than I do. Set in 1962, the film tells the story of a mute person working as a cleaner played by Sally Hawkins as she finds an aquatic-man-thing locked up in the secret Government building she's working at. Over the course of the movie the two form a bond and ultimately fall in love.. which really rubs dirt into the wound of my own parents' divorce. My Mum and Dad couldn't find anything in common after twenty years of marriage and yet here a fishman manages to form a connection with a woman simply because she sneaks him the odd snack whilst at work. Of course I'm all for office romances but it's unusual for one of the happy couple to have fucking gills. All of this is of course going on behind the back of Michael Shannon's head of security who simply wants to cut the creature up because, despite his claims that he wants to learn from it, he really just fucking hates it. Usually you might imagine he'd encourage his colleagues to take their work home with them, but he does seem somewhat less impressed when that work is a fish-monster, and what they want to do is to shove it up themselves. I can appreciate it might be tricky for Hawkins' mute cleaner to find a boyfriend, but perhaps she should try Tinder before literally taking the advice of 'hopping onto Plenty Of Fish'.
