Setting aside all the accusations of plagiarism from all over the place (some of which I can definitely see, the whole time I was thinking "this feels like if you combined Amélie and Creature from the Black Lagoon" and then I come to find out Jean-Pierre Jeunet directly accused Guillermo of plagiarizing his films lol and the creature's design was inspired by Creature from the Black Lagoon) what I really liked about the movie was its playful juxtaposition of some things like:
- The griminess of the sets with the beautifully innocent almost Disney princess-esque soundtrack.
- The almost lowbrow mundane depictions of nudity and sexuality in contrast to the puritanism of the period (amplified by the scene where Michael Shannon bangs his wife while he smothers her noises with his bleeding mutilated hand).
- The main character masturbating in her bathtub while an egg timer sits on her sink timing down her eggs boiling on the stove top (female masturbation in cinema is rarely ever depicted as so banal, especially with a flowery composed piece of music playing over it).
The design of the creature itself is absolutely top notch and one of the biggest highlights of the film which I think even those who disliked the movie can agree with. Sally Hawkins is also pretty god damn sexy.
I also appreciated the symbolism of the scene where the creature eats Jenkins' cat whose name is Pandora, moments before he flees their apartment and into the city where his first stop is a cinema directly below their apartment building. Eating the cat Pandora is the literal catalyst for opening Pandora's Box. I liked it, made me smile.
The running gag/mini-arc of Michael Shannon's fucked up fingers was pretty disgusting and humorous, the pus scene and the end where he finally tears his own fingers off were fucked up. This also gets into the environmentalist symbolism of the film, with the creature representing nature and when it's treated right it has the ability to heal, but when it's treated wrong it bites off your fingers which then begin to fester once they've been re-attached lmfao.
Just wanted to push back on something you said in your review
@no country for old wainds where you said nobody had any use for Jenkins' shitty art, I'm not sure if you were just wording it this way for effect or you genuinely missed the clues that his character is gay and that's why his employer seemed to give him the run-around.
The reason his art got rejected was because it depicted a nuclear family and if you remember when he goes into the office and is told to redraw certain elements of his painting, his boss asks him if he's still drinking and Jenkins implores that he's quit, to me this seems to allude to a moment that may have occurred where Jenkins was drunk and hit on another guy in the office (the cliched "sorry I was drunk and didn't know what I was doing" excuse from closeted people when their true self slips out a bit) and now they think he's gay and don't want to work with him.
This is also why he flirts with the man who works at the pie place, and is asked to leave saying (paraphrased) "this is a family friendly establishment." There's a constant theme of family values contrasted against a mute orphan woman, a gay man trying to work as an artist in the advertisement industry which is heavily family-focused at that time, and a fish/man/thing not created in God's own image (as Shannon's character puts it) and as such the film's point (or one of them) is that "family" has many appearances, and in fact the "nuclear family" is an unnatural modern creation. If you think about it, the Jenkins/Hawkins dynamic is an analogy for a gay man adopting an orphan girl (something family values types often rail against).
I don't think anything about this film is shoehorned, disinterested or incoherent myself. Pandering perhaps but it's all very purposeful, symbolic and intersecting thematically.
Other things I learned after watching it; Jenkins' character was actually originally written for Ian McKellen, Octavia Spencer who played Zelda said one of the things she really liked about the script was that by having the two main characters be mute it meant most of the dialogue came from a black woman and a man in the closet (this is how you do social justice messaging in cinema imo beautiful subversion), Hawkins wearing more and more red as the film goes on was something I noticed and liked but thought maybe it was just my imagination, I didn't want to rewind and see, but according to IMDB Trivia this was done on purpose. I assume to symbolize her revitalization as an entity in the world? That's my interpretation anyhow.
Sorry long rambling post lol.
