Summary
Elisa is caught by Hoffstetler as she is fiddling with the creature's shackles and she thinks she's caught, but instead, he offers her the keys to unlock it and asks who she works for. As she undoes the creature's harness and stuffs him into a laundry cart, Hoffstetler gives her instructions for taking care of the creature. Hoffstetler runs off to attach the "Israeli popper" explosive device to the electrical system to disable it. Meanwhile, Zelda has noticed Elisa hasn't punched out and punches her card for her, clearly aware that something is amiss.
In the closed circuit television, Strickland notices an unscheduled laundry van pull up to the security checkpoint. It's Giles in the van, and he's doing a very poor job of acting normal to the security guard who's examining his forged credentials. Just when Strickland decides to go down to investigate this unscheduled delivery and the security guard asks Giles to get out of the vehicle, the popper goes off and disables the electricity in the whole building. Hoffstetler runs to Giles's assistance and injects the guard with the serum he was given to kill the creature. Giles then drives to the loading bay, where Elisa and Zelda help the creature into the van. Giles is so enchanted by the creature that he crashes into Strickland's new Cadillac, creating just enough time for Strickland to catch up to them and start shooting at the van. Even though he empties his entire clip into the vehicle, Giles still manages to drive away.
Back at Elisa's apartment, the creature is struggling to breathe in her bathtub. She frantically empties salt into the water and eventually it starts breathing properly and relaxes. Totally drained, she lets salt start pouring on the bathroom floor, and she and Giles share an exhausted laugh over it. Meanwhile, Strickland has found the Israeli Popper and Fleming tells him that he called in the heist. Strickland is very annoyed, and his face turns pale when his secretary comes to tell him that General Hoyt is on the phone for him. Hoyt, of course, tells Strickland he needs to get the asset back immediately. At Elisa's house, she marks her calendar on the 10th: the day when rain will fill the canal and she'll let the creature free. She takes a greeting card to the creature that reads "Glad to Have You as a Friend," and they share a tender moment over it.
Fleming tells Strickland that he thinks it took a team of 10 highly trained men to carry out the heist, as Strickland is staring out a window leering at Elisa. We think that he has some sense she was involved, but then we see him give her a creepy, sexualizing look and know he's just lusting for her. She's very disturbed by his glare. Strickland brings Elisa and Zelda in to interrogate them and ask if they saw anything amiss, but they tell him nothing. He grows frustrated and asks himself why he's interviewing "the help"—and says other rude things about them—then dismisses them. Elisa signs "Fuck you" at Strickland on their way out.
Giles falls asleep while sitting in the bathroom with the creature and drawing him, so the creature goes out to explore. In Giles' apartment, he watches some TV and then sees a cat. An exchange of roars between the two animals wakes Giles up, and he finds the creature eating the cat's head. Giles shouts for him to stop, and the creature, startled, runs out of the apartment and slashes Giles's arm on the way. While Elisa is talking to Hoffstetler—he gives her supplies and tells her his real name is Dimitri—she gets a call from Giles, and rushes home. Giles catches her up on everything and she has to go find the escaped creature. She finds him in the movie theater below her apartment, watching the big screen, and brings him back upstairs. There, the creature touches Giles's head and arm, and starts glowing blue, but Giles makes him stop. Giles is enamored.
At the facility, Strickland questions a stony Hoffstetler, who tells Strickland that he left a tenure-track job in Wisconsin to work at this facility, and nothing more. Strickland clearly has no leads, but suspects Hoffstetler. At Elisa's apartment, she and the creature are getting more and more intimate, culminating in her undressing and getting in the bathtub with the creature. When it looks like they're about to have sex, we cut to Elisa, sitting on the bus and glowing. At work, Zelda somehow intuits that Elisa did the deed and asks how that would work. Elisa uses her hand to demonstrate and Zelda is a little appalled and very thrilled.
Hoffstetler's Russian contacts come to his apartment and catch him in his underwear. He invites them in, and they tell him that he will soon be extracted. But Hoffstetler feels that they may be here to kill him, so cuts a piece of cake for one of them as an excuse to brandish a knife. They leave without any violence, but something is clearly amiss. Meanwhile, Strickland is at home with his family. The kids are watching television and his wife is presenting him a desert, but he's totally tuned out. He goes to sit in his damaged Cadillac and inspects his disgusting fingers. They clearly smell terrible. He sits in there and contemplates.
Analysis
A big part of what makes The Shape of Water such a satisfying film is its wide range of emotional experiences. Del Toro goes back to his roots as a Hitchcock fanatic to craft an exquisitely suspenseful heist scene where, in classic Hitchcock fashion, a not-so-innocent woman is put in the crosshairs of a violent psychopath.
Del Toro borrows a bit of Hitchcock's film language too, using anxiety-inducing tracking shots to lend a sense of being followed that may well be plucked from the Jimmy Stewart version of The Man Who Wasn't There, and quick-cut edits to dilate time, à la Vertigo. Even though we just know Elisa is going to break that creature out, del Toro keeps us guessing exactly how she's going to do it until then end.
During this heist scene there's another one of Del Toro's peculiar visual rhymes. Strickland's Cadillac gets smashed as Giles stumbles in his role as the getaway driver. After just seeing the creature loaded into the back of this faux laundry van, we realize that the creature and the Cadillac are the same shade of greenish blue. Perhaps this is just del Toro making a wry visual pun, or perhaps it's a statement on Strickland's desire to constantly possess objects, be that an exotic creature from the Amazon or a fine luxury automobile. This may well be the little cherry on top of del Toro's indictment of white-picket-fence, middle-class American values throughout the film.
Del Toro considers himself a visual filmmaker, seemingly thanks in part to his love of comic books. He creates a series of sketches and sometimes even comics based on his films as part of his development process, and a number of those comics have been published — including one for The Shape of Water. Del Toro, of course, has also adapted the Hellboy comics for the screen to substantial box office success. Therefore, it's likely relevant that The Shape of Water has a character who is so often drawing: Giles. In this segment of the film, we watch him sketch the creature as it sleeps in Elisa's bath tub, and during that drawing process he comes to find beauty in the creature.
There is a message here about a life full of art. Giles may be a lonesome man, but he knows how to find the beauty in the world around him because he can channel it through his sketchpad. Elisa's dancing throughout the film likewise gives her an opportunity to find joy no matter where she is or what she's doing. It may well be the case that between his obsession with the monster and his drive to draw, Giles stands as a surrogate for del Toro himself, a filmmaker consumed by the fantastical and grotesque yet tuned into the potential emotional resonances of any story he tries to tell.
