Summary
Elisa eats a bowl of cereal in Giles's apartment while they watch a Bette Davis movie. Giles has just finished an illustration for a Jello advertisement and jubilantly tells Elisa that when he gets paid for it, they're going to go get pie. Elisa does not want the pie. Giles, giddy, rushes out with the illustration, and Elisa watches Bette Davis sing a love song. Something is stirring in our protagonist. When Giles presents the illustration to his client, though, it's rejected, and the client says that the Jello needs to be green. We then learn that Giles used to be employed by this man, and was fired for drinking.
At work, Elisa sneaks into the lab where the asset is being kept, and offers the creature an egg. This is the first time we get a good look at the creature—a beautiful blue and green muscular thing that blinks sideways. Initially, it's afraid of Elisa when she offers the egg, screaming at her, but she is undeterred. She leaves the egg on the ledge of its pool, makes the ASL sign for egg, and lets the creature take it. Right after, Elisa and Zelda are summoned to Strickland's office.
During this meeting, Strickland says several racist things to Zelda and reprimands Elisa for getting mustard on his severed fingers, never thanking her for saving the fingers, which have been reattached. He tells them to do nothing more than clean the lab and leave, referring to the creature being held there as an abomination. We learn that it was Strickland himself who captured the creature in South America and brought it back. When the pair are on their way out, Strickland takes a call from an army general and remarks that he still has his thumb, his trigger, and his pussy finger, and then says that decisions need to be made about the asset. Elisa goes back to the lab and leaves the creature more eggs. It makes the sign for egg.
Strickland returns home, where we see that he lives the exact ideal of suburban life, with a son, a daughter, and an attentive wife. He's cold to all of them, making the intensely colorful '60s interior design of the house feel especially uncomfortable and off. We watch him have perfectly boring missionary position sex with his wife, whose mouth he covers with his bleeding fingers as he demands total silence of her during the act.
That scene at Strickland's home is juxtaposed with a starkly contrasting tender sequence displaying Elisa's budding rapport with the creature. It starts with Elisa giving him another egg as she plays "I Know Why (And So Do You)" by Glen Miller on a record player she snuck into the laboratory. She teaches the creature the sign for music, and the song plays during a sequence when she feeds him more eggs and plays him more music. Elisa dances around in front of the tank, the creature returns the sign for music and, eventually, we see Dr. Hoffstetler climb out of the shadows, witnessing a tender moment when both Elisa and the creature are leaning against the glass of his tank towards each other. Does this mean the jig is up for Elisa and her new friend?
Well, we quickly learn that Hoffstetler has his own secrets. At his apartment, Hoffstetler pulls out a false plank in his floorboards containing blueprints of the lab. He then goes to a quarry, where he meets two Russian men who pull up in a big sedan. He's taken to a Russian restaurant, where he makes a rendezvous in the kitchen. It ends up that Hoffstetler's real name is not Bob but Dimitri, and he's an agent for the Russian government. He hands his contact notes about the creature and the blueprints of the lab, and tells them to extract the creature from the facility soon. Hoffstetler also wants his contact to tell the directorate that the creature is intelligent, and capable of communication—responding to both language and music.
As Elisa and Zelda are taking the laundry to the laundry truck, Zelda stops to take a smoke break, but Elisa points with concern to the security camera. One of the other workers taking a smoke break tells her they push it up and it creates a blindspot, and we see something click in Elisa's head. Just after, she goes to the creature's room, where she finds it chained up out of the water and bleeding. She drops the egg she was going to give it, and runs to a dark corner of the room when Strickland re-enters. He continues with his torture of the creature, zapping it with a cattle prod.
To up the suspense, Stickland's boss General Hoyt walks in with a crew including Hoffstetler to see the asset. Strickland explains to him that the Amazonians worshipped the creature like a god right before the team launches into the discussion about the scientific edge it can give the Americans over the Russians in their quest to get to space. Hoffstetler makes the case that since it can breathe two separate ways, it's a valuable specimen to study. Strickland seems to agree, but advocates for vivisecting the creature, something Hoffstetler tells the general they can't do. The general doesn't like being told what he can and can't do, and makes that clear to Hoffstetler. During all of this, Hoffstetler notices Elisa hiding in the shadows. When they all leave the lab, Elisa runs out, panicked. She chases Strickland and the general back to Strickland's office, where she hears the general order Strickland to carry out the vivisection and do it fast.
Analysis
Guillermo del Toro gets a lot of mileage out of making a fairytale that's rated R. Much like the Brothers Grimm, del Toro isn't afraid to portray violence in the service of spinning a morality tale, but what's really interesting is the type of violence del Toro depicts. Yes, there's the gore stuff with Strickland torturing the creature or Strickland's slowly rotting fingers that have been reattached to his hand. But the violence del Toro is really interested in is that enacted by white men in positions of power. Take the scene when Strickland calls Zelda and Elisa into his office to explain that the creature is confidential. Instead of simply having Strickland tell the women that the existence of the creature is classified, del Toro depicts Strickland as saying a number of racist things to Zelda about "your people." The violence fabric del Toro depicts is something woven deep into the American fabric of the post-World War II era.
One of the things that make this film really interesting is del Toro's scathing take on that post-war status quo. One of the freakiest spaces we enter in the film is Strickland's home, which feels like del Toro is making a colorized version of Leave It To Beaver with all of the actors hopped up on amphetamines. The lighting is bright and full of orange and yellow, providing a stark contrast to the cozy, dimly lit interiors of Elisa's and Giles's homes as well as to the green and blue that are often associated with both water and life in the film.
One crucial component of this grown-up fairytale is the way that love and sex are depicted. On the topic of Strickland's family life, we watch him have aggressively boring conventional sex with his wife, silencing both her moans of pleasure and her protests over having his rotting fingers in her face. In this classic American family, the woman needs to keep quiet and act like a sex doll for her husband. At the other extreme, this segment of the movie depicts Elisa's peculiar and absolutely endearing courtship of the creature, as she feeds it eggs and plays big-band records for it. Through this unconventional pairing and unconventional courtship—almost totally free of dialogue—del Toro places value on the love that develops on its own terms despite all odds, putting it in stark contrast to the cookie-cutter white picket fence coupling shown in the Strickland household.
Another way Del Toro also flips the script on the Cold War status quo's politics is through the Dr. Hoffstetler character. Hoffstetler is one of the more sympathetic Soviet spies in the history of American cinema, as del Toro gives us a glimpse into his noble motives for espionage and portrays his quick acceptance of the creature as a very intelligent being that is very similar to humans. Hoffstetler is a kind man driven by curiosity and empathy, and del Toro makes sure we root for him, whether in interactions with his Soviet contacts or while dealing with Strickland and the rest of the American military hierarchy. Through Hoffstetler, Del Toro asks us to imagine Soviets—even their double agents—as human beings just like us. It's as subversive a move as using Strickland's family to portray the derangement of the post-war American dream.
