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This Weekend’s Best Bet: The Shape of Water


If Guillermo del Toro’s last movie, Crimson Peak, was about how love can make monsters of humanity, then his newest movie is the exact photographic negative. The Shape of Water, out this weekend, is a sci-fi romance about people the world has discarded. Elisa, a mute woman serving as a custodian for a secret government facility, meets her very own fairytale frog prince, who just so happens to be an actual amphibian. Part send-up of B-movie creature features, part metaphor for living on the outskirts of a world enforcing normalcy with violent insistence, The Shape of Water is the fusion of conceptual weirdness and genuine emotion for which del Toro is known.

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