The movie, which won Best Picture, tells “disabled people [that they] should go and be with their kind,” one critic said.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for “The Shape of Water.”
Elsa Sjunneson-Henry was psyched when she heard about Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water.”
As a speculative fiction author and editor who is legally blind and deaf, Sjunneson-Henry couldn’t wait to see a science fiction film featuring a protagonist with a disability.
“I was super excited to potentially see a movie about a disabled woman as a hero in a genre setting,” Sjunneson-Henry told HuffPost.
The film, which won four Academy Awards including Best Picture, stars Sally Hawkins as Elisa, a cleaning woman who works at a top-secret government lab in the 1960s. Elisa, who is mute, lives a lonely life despite having two caring friends who are also outsiders — Giles (Richard Jenkins), who is gay, and Zelda (Octavia Spencer), who is black.
But Elisa’s life drastically changes when she discovers that the research facility where she works is performing questionable experiments on an aquatic but human-like creature (Doug Jones).
Sjunneson-Henry thought “The Shape of Water” would be a heist movie, in which Elisa and her ragtag group of underdog friends band together, save the fish man and triumph over injustice.
“I wanted to walk away from that movie feeling like, ‘Yay! I got to see a disabled main character have lots of agency and [engage in] a lot of bad ass-ery,’” she said. “But that’s not what I got.”
What she got instead was a love story in which a character who is disabled falls in love with the Creature from the Black Lagoon because he’s the only being she can relate to on a deeper, emotional level.
In a heated scene in which Elisa explains why rescuing the Amphibian Man (as the character is listed on IMDb) is so important to her, she says that the creature “does not know what I lack or how I am incomplete. He sees me, for what I am, as I am.”