Summary
Elisa greets the creature in the bathroom, give him a coy look, and turns all the faucets on. Soon, the sink and bathtub are overflowing and filling the bathroom with water. She undresses and soon the two are underwater, submerged figuratively and literally in their romance. We see the water start to drip through the floors into the movie theater below, and the movie theater owner comes up to yell at Giles and get him to take care of it. When Giles gets into Elisa's apartment, he finds the water pouring out of the bathroom door, and opens the bathroom door to a surge of the bath water. Elisa and the creature are holding each other. While Elisa and Giles are drying off in Giles's apartment, Giles notes that ever since the creature touched him, his hair is starting to grow back and his wound disappeared. Is the creature really a god? he asks. He pleads to Elisa to keep the creature around longer.
Hoffstetler gets a call from the Russians that his extraction will be carried out in 48 hours. He seems dismayed, and even more so when he peers out the window to see someone in a car outside pointing binoculars at his window. At Elisa's apartment, the creature is staring out the window at the rain, and she can tell it's not feeling well being out of a big body of water for this long. At the research facility, General Hoyt has arrived to check in on the status of the asset. Strickland says he hasn't found it yet, and pleads with Hoyt to let him get away with one mistake, not to let this smear his entire character. In response, Hoyt tells him that if he doesn't get the asset in 36 hours, Strickland will be relocated and have his existence totally erased from all records.
On the eve of October 10th—the day Elisa planned to let the creature free—she sits at her kitchen table with the creature and starts to weep as she looks at him. In a quiet croak she speaks "You'll never know," and then starts to sing as the apartment changes into an old musical-style set piece, where she does a dance number with the creature while singing him a love song. A little later, Zelda finds Elisa crying in the locker room at their job, and then we cut to the creature bleeding in Elisa's bathtub, as Zelda rubs its arm pulling off some scales. Zelda says they have to release him tonight.
Strickland and Fleming sit in a car outside of Hoffstetler's apartment building, with Strickland downing pain killers and Fleming remarking on how terrible Strickland's rotting fingers smell. When Hoffstetler exits the building, Strickland makes Fleming get out of the car despite the fact that it's raining (and that it's Fleming's car). When Hoffstetler meets with his Russian contacts for the extraction, one of them shoots him in the face and gut, but is then shot in the head. It's Strickland, and he kills both Russians. While Hoffstetler is dying, Strickland digs his fingers into his wounds to torture him for information about the names and ranks of the people who stole the asset. In his dying breaths, Hoffstetler laughs at Strickland and says they have no names or ranks—they just clean.
While Zelda and her husband are bickering at home, Strickland shows up to their house demanding to know where the creature is. As an intimidation tactic, he tells Zelda the end of the parable of Samson and Delilah, while ripping his rotting fingers off his hand. Zelda is terrified, but silent. It's her husband who breaks first, telling Strickland that the mute girl took the creature. Zelda reprimands him, and then calls Elisa to warn her that Strickland is coming for her. By the time Strickland gets to Elisa's apartment, everyone is gone. But he does some rifling around and finds the tear-off sheet on the calendar where Elisa marked that she'd bring the creature to the docks on the 10th.
Down at the docks, Elisa and Giles give their tender goodbyes to the ailing creature. The creature puts his hand on Giles head and, of course, embraces Elisa in the rain. The creature signs to Elisa, "You and me, together," but she responds, "no, without me." And then out of nowhere, Strickland shows up, punching Giles in the face and then shooting the creature in the chest. He shoots Elisa too. It seems like Elisa and the creature will share the final moments before their deaths. Just when Strickland is admiring his job well done, Giles gets up and slams his face with the end of a 2-by-4. Giles runs to hold Elisa and behind them, the creature's body sparkles blue.
The creature jolts to life and comes to its feet. He walks over to Strickland, who looks at the creature proclaims that it is a god—and then he slashes Strickland's throat. Right when the police arrive at the scene with Zelda, the creature takes Elisa in his arms and jumps into the water. Underwater, the creature slowly rubs Elisa's scarred neck. He embraces her face, gives her a long kiss, and she opens her eyes. The creature has healed her, and given her the ability to breathe underwater.
Analysis
Del Toro has said in interviews that the concept for The Shape of Water dates back to his childhood when he first saw The Creature from the Black Lagoon and picked up on the sexual tension between the monster and Julie Adams's character. As he tells it, he wanted to see a story where the monster gets the girl instead of getting killed. And so we have in The Shape of Water a bizarre and heartwarming hybrid between a monster movie and a love story. So even though it's really quite freaky (in multiple sense of the term) that Elisa has sex with the creature, much of the plausibility of the love connection is derived from del Toro's exquisitely shot love scenes.
With slow motion and a floating camera, Del Toro mixes the lurid and the languid, as the act of love making appears on screen as sumptuous and joyous. It's a savvy move that del Toro waits until late in the film to ramp up the artifice. This is also the part of the movie when we're given a wonderful black-and-white musical number reminiscent of a Gene Kelly film. An orchestra plays while Elisa and the creature dance together on some strange sound stage that seems to exist in the ether and, most fantastical of all, Elisa is singing and has an absolutely beautiful voice. Through these fantastical scenes, we break out of the monotonous world of post-World War II America and are able to indulge in the full breadth of Elisa's and the creature's burgeoning love.
Del Toro, once he has indulged in these especially fantastical moments, has a little more leeway to wrap up the film as he pleases. For example, in contrast to the exquisite romance scenes, the director also presents the most agonizing of body horror. Strickland, as always, ups the ante. In Zelda's house, he rips off his rotting fingers as an intimidation tactic, and gets Zelda's husband to squeal. Later, at the scene of Hoffstetler's shooting, he drags Hoffstetler around through a hole in his cheek and then pries at the hole in his gut. This is how del Toro shows that Strickland will not be stopped and sets up the question that drives the rest of this film: will Elisa and the creature be able to enjoy their happily ever after?
As this is a fairytale, of course they do. But since this is a fairytale with an R rating, Guillermo del Toro doesn't let us go without some of the requisite ugliness. Strickland shows up at the dock in a burst of violence, assaulting Giles and shooting the creature and Elisa. This bit is so important, because it shows us the ugliness of the world the creature and Elisa are about to leave behind for their life of love under the sea.
After an entire film where del Toro paints his picture of everything rotten to the core about the American suburban ideal and all of the violent missteps of Cold War militaries, it is important that the happily ever after will occurs far away from all that human nonsense. The happy ending is not just that Elisa and the creature will remain together, but that they escape to a different world.
