The Shape of Water: all the trailers, interviews, and commentary for Guillermo del Toro’s new fantasy fairy tale – The Verge

Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water is the year’s most sentimental fish romance

2017-12-07T11:37:01-05:00

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review originally appeared on the site in September, in conjunction with the film's opening at the Toronto International Film Festival. It has been updated for the film's theatrical release.

Writer-director Guillermo del Toro has always been fascinated by ghosts. Sometimes those ghosts are literal - in his movies Crimson Peak and The Devil's Backbone, they're the shades of the dead, actively seeking vengeance against those who wronged them. In other films, like his Hellboy movies or Pacific Rim, the ghosts are mor …

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Michael Shannon explains how his name became a slang term on the Shape of Water shoot

2017-12-06T14:23:00-05:00

Michael Shannon isn't just a screen villain. He's frequently played soulful, sympathetic heroes, particularly in the films of writer-director Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter, Midnight Special). His stage career, as an actor, director, and co-founder of Chicago's Red Orchid Theatre, has let him take on a wide variety of characters, like the embattled, disintegrating romantic lead in the stage and film version of Tracy Letts' grueling Bug. And he's been nominated twice for Best Supporting Actor Oscars, in both cases for sympathetic parts: as a mentally ill man in Revolutionary Road, and a fascinating detective in Nocturnal Animals. …

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Guillermo del Toro takes on the Cold War in the final trailer for The Shape of Water

2017-11-09T17:04:40-05:00

Guillermo del Toro went on Facebook earlier today to answer questions about his upcoming film The Shape of Water, and then surprised audiences by unveiling the film's final trailer.

The Shape of Water is a film set in the 1950s that follows a mute woman named Elisa (Sally Hawkins) who mops up floors at a facility that's housing a strange aquatic creature. Michael Shannon plays Strickland, a man tasked with keeping an eye on the beast, who believes it is dangerous and not to be trusted. Elisa soon bonds with the creature, however, leading to a surprising relationship between the two. The film premiered earlier this year at the Toronto Intern …

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The Shape of Water’s new trailer features angry scientists, a sea monster, and love

2017-09-14T12:25:34-04:00

The red band trailer for Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water is here, and it gives us a deeper look at what the Cold War-era movie is actually about - at least, kind of.

Sally Hawkins (Godzilla) stars as Elisa, a mute woman who works at some kind of test facility for deranged, secretive government experiments. She feeds eggs to a two-legged sea beast, and they fall in love. Elisa's friend Zelda (played by Octavia Spencer) helps Elisa smuggle the creature out of the facility, which they appear to do by shoving it in a pile of laundry. (You may remember this technique from the 1982 movie Annie, when Annie escapes the orphanage.)

Michael …

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Watch the first trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s Cold War-era monster movie

2017-07-19T11:54:47-04:00

The first trailer for Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water is here, and it shows the director going back to his dark fantasy roots. The trailer starts with voiceover, asking, "If I were to tell you about her, the Princess Without Voice, what would I say?"

The narrator seems to refer to Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a mute woman who works with her friend Zelda (Octavia Spencer) at a Cold War-era government facility. She stumbles upon some kind of Amazonian aquaman creature in one of the labs and develops an intimate friendship with it, much to the fury of a supervisor (played by Michael Shannon!), who does not understand sign language and appear …

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Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water now has a release date

2017-04-19T17:38:44-04:00

It seems as though Guillermo del Toro is constantly attached to a ton of projects, but his next film, The Shape of Water, now has a release date: December 8th, 2017, right in the middle the Hollywood's award nomination season.

Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, The Shape of Water is described as "an other-worldly fairy tale," which follows Elisa (Sally Hawkins,) who works at a top-secret government laboratory. There, she and a co-worker (Octavia Spencer) discovers a classified experiment in the form of an "aquatic man," played by Doug Jones.

The film has been described as a more intimate picture along the lines of his earlier films …

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