Summary
We open underwater, on a dream-like tracking shot through a fully submerged apartment building hallway. Sweeping into one of the apartments, we see a kitchen table and chairs floating and then a woman sleeping feet above the couch it seems like she fell asleep on, which is also floating. In voiceover, the character of Giles introduces the story like a fairytale, setting the story of a princess without a voice on a small city on the coast. He tells us this will be a tale of love and loss, and "a monster who tried to destroy it all." The sleeping woman is Elisa Esposito. When her alarm clock rings, we find her waking up on the same couch, in the same apartment, yet not underwater.
From a dream we go to waking life and watch Elisa prepare for her day: boiling eggs, looking at the scars on her neck, masturbating in the bathtub, tearing off yesterday's date on the calendar, buffing her shoes, packing a sandwich. She stops next door to visit her neighbor Giles, bringing him a small breakfast and pausing to watch a bit of a Shirley Temple film with him. We see Giles at work illustrating, and learn from their interaction that Elisa cannot speak.
On her way out, Elisa tap dances a little in the hallway and catches the attention of the man who owns the movie theater she lives over. He gives her tickets to a new movie that's opening. We can see a chocolate factory burning in the background. She stops to admire some shoes in the window of a store before getting on the bus to go to her job. It's clear from these exterior shots that the film is set sometime in the 1960s.
She gets to work barely on time, and her friend and co-worker lets her cut the line so that she can still punch her time card on time, right at the stroke of midnight. Elisa and Zelda work the late shift, it seems. We watch Elisa and Zelda cleaning this building together, and it seems that they work in some sort of high-tech facility, given the hilarious shot of Zelda brushing off a giant turbine with a feather duster. Throughout, Zelda talks about her husband and Elisa seems to listen gladly. Their cleaning takes them to some sort of laboratory room with a giant pool of water in it, where Zelda proceeds to harangue the staff for leaving their trash all over the floor and not putting it in the can.
A man named Fleming asks Zelda to tone down and refrain from blasphemously using the word "God." He gets the attention of everyone in the lab and introduces Colonel Richard Strickland who has escorted a very important and sensitive asset to the lab. Elisa inspects the tank it was brought in, and a hand shoots and starts smacking at the glass. Elisa is startled and it attracts Strickland's attention. Elisa and Zelda are dismissed and rush out of the laboratory.
Giles takes Elisa to a pie shop for some breakfast pie so that he can flirt with the clerk who works the counter there. Back at Giles' apartment, they eat the key lime pie and Elisa seems repulsed by the flavor. Giles puts it in his ice box where there are a slew of uneaten slices of radioactive green key lime pies. When Elisa turns the channel to footage of civil rights protests, Giles tells her to change the channel, and they flip to a Bette Davis musical. As the music plays, we watch Elisa repeat her wake-up again, landing her back on the bus to her job.
As she and Zelda are cleaning the men's bathroom, Strickland comes in and sets a giant stick down on the sink. As he's peeing, he details the specifications of the cattle prod, and when he takes it on his way out, it leaves blood on the sink. Back outside the bathroom, Elisa and Zelda can hear agonizing sounds coming from the lab where the asset is being kept. They're called by Fleming to clean up a mess, and in the midst of cleaning blood off the floor, Elisa finds two loose fingers. She places them in the bag she brought her lunch in and hands it to Fleming. After everyone has left, Elisa takes a moment to look in the tank at the thing inside it. This is when we catch our first glimpse of the sea creature, a humanoid thing who comes to the glass and swims away.
Analysis
The Shape of Water is Guillermo del Toro's take on a fairytale, and he establishes that mode of storytelling with his opening scene, a prologue. With Giles's monologue introducing Elisa and her strange love and the surreal imagery of Elisa's apartment underwater, we're drawn into a parallel version of the 1960s United States. In interviews, del Toro has stated that he felt the need to set the film in the past in order to explore ideas that would fall flat if depicted within the context of the current day. To that end, this fairytale introduction helps us suspend our expectations that we'll see a true-to-life version of the 1960s, and in turn allow for this period piece to be infused with some magic.
In her book Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes, Annette Insdorf outlines how a film's opening scene doesn't just set the stage for the narrative to follow, but hands the viewer the key to unlocking the film by giving us a sense of the visual language that will comprise the movie, and framing our characters and events in ways that set the tone.
And indeed in this film, del Toro orchestrates this opening prologue like a maestro, inviting us into his story via a dream-like, surreal sequence that lends us an enchanting look at our protagonist and dazzles the sense with swelling music and a the beautiful blue and green hues that saturate many of the major spaces seen later in the film, such as the laboratory. Many of these tropes are echoed in strange and funny ways, such as through the radioactive green key lime pie that Giles purchases so he can flirt with the clerk at the pie shop.
The opening scene also mirrors the final scene of the film, as we see Elisa suspended and floating underwater, yet peculiarly alive. As noted in a profile in the New Yorker, del Toro is a proponent of something he refers to as "visual rhymes." The definition is a bit vague, but the gist of it is that del Toro enjoys using visual motifs to draw parallels between scenes. Hence, this mirroring of the beginning and end of the film are a bit of a poetic flare on the filmmakers part, setting the film to be tied up with a neat little bow once that final scene rolls around.
Giles' monologue also sets up a central theme as he mentions "the monster who tried to destroy it all." One of the key ironies of the film is that the sea monster is one of the film's heroes and the detective character Strickland plays the real monster. By having Giles allude to this during the prologue, del Toro very clearly sets up a story of good and evil and gives the audience a tantalizing hint that one of the characters we'll soon meet will be quite evil. And indeed, when we finally meet Strickland—talking about his electric cattle prod while urinating in front of Elisa and Zelda—we know this man is no good. It's efficient storytelling that helps make the stakes clear in a story that, for a fairy tale, is rather morally and emotionally complex.
