This movie named “shape of water” is, in fact, about to tell us one love story that accompany with some mythical and (or) biblical allegories in Baltimore 60’s. What we can comprehend in first sight is that there is one love story that occurs between one young woman and one monster who lives in water. This, already reminds us the old story of “Beauty and the Beast”, but we have to go further. This story is stated by a narrator, the person who lives next to the protagonist. He is an old man like the old tale-tellers of ancient Greek or of any other ancient culture. For instance, he’s like Homer _author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. He believes in god’s of ancient world. He speaks of those gods in some parts of the movie. And finally he asserts that this strange story is real _just like the tale-tellers of mythical world who believes in what they described, no matter how strange it was.
Before we go further in old man’s allegory, let’s go back to the story of monster and found out that who he really is. Colonel Richard Strickland is the one who captured this creature from a South American river. In one scene he says that people of that land, worship this creature as a god. Now there is one principle in old Greek mythology that ordinary people must not know the secrets of gods and anyone who betray this principle, must punished. So let’s go back to that old man. In one scene he compare himself with Tantalus that was a Greek mythological figure. Tantalus is one of those figures who revealed the secrets of the gods. So his punishment is to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches, with the fruit ever eluding his grasp, and the water always receding before he could take a drink. The story of old man is perfectly like Tantalus story, since he also reveals the secret of the god/monster of that South American river. That’s why he must suffer. He fell in love with people but this love is forbidden for his time, so that kind of love is not available for him, again, just like Tantalus who can see the water and fruits but he can’t reach them.
As i mentioned before, in some parts of the movie, they talk of that creature as if it’s a god. This issue brings us a vast field of references and subjects. For example, we can see that the antagonist Colonel Richard Strickland quoted several times from the Bible. And in one dialogue, he said that god must looked like himself and there is no similarity between that monster and god. This instance implied a contrast between science and religion. Antagonist applying the tools of science and this matter makes him proud of himself and thus he consider himself as a god. However, at the end, he understand that how useless was his power.
Also it seems that the title of the movie pointed the same subject in some theosophical way. It means that the concept of god in conversation of theosophy is just like water. There is no shape in it, but you can imagine it in whatever shape that you want _and sometimes in shape of a monster. It’s remind us the concept of goodness in that old story that i mentioned before, “Beauty and the Beast” that there we learn that we can find goodness and kindness in the Beast. But that’s another story. Let’s go back to that theosophical interpretation. If we accept that that creature is god, so we can say that the love of protagonist for him is kind of divine. And their actual “being together” is coming with their death at the end _or we could replace death with the concept of opening the door to a new world, just like what we see in other film of Guillermo del Toro, named “Pan’s Labyrinth”.
If we put these interpretations aside, we could see that all these references and multiple layers of meaning are unable to give a fresh form to the movie. In another word, this movie have no structural innovation except the ones that are Hollywood cliches. Treatment of monster in this movie is so similar to Steven Spielberg's “E.T.” character. On the other hand, in several moments, we can see scenes of classic Hollywood movies that aired on television and with these scenes, director tries to accounting the use of cliches _just like the work that “La La Land” in 2016 tries to do. After all this misuse of cliche is damaged the movie. Eventually we can consider this movie as an acceptable experience among the other works of del Toro. But if you compare this one to the other film of him, “Pan’s Labyrinth”, you can see the less of narrative or formal innovation.