It kind of pains me that Guillermo del Toro would turn out a movie I ended up rejecting rather completely. His same sumptuous visuals are present along with that precise but weird approach to monster design, and yet, the script is something of a complete mess of coincidence while its villain is so cartoonishly evil that its obvious attempts at elevating Creature from the Black Lagoon end up falling apart.

Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is a mute janitor at a secret government facility in Baltimore in the early 1960s along with her best friend Zelda (Octavia Spencer). Elisa is a lonely individual who lives by routine getting herself ready for her nightshift and spending her mornings afterwards with her neighbor, Giles (Richard Jenkins), a gay man and ad painter working on a picture of red Jello for his former ad agency employer. Into Elisa's life comes The Amphibian Man (Doug Jones), the latest addition to the lab, held in chains and large tanks, and the capture of the head of security, Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon).

Now, the first act or so of the film I was actually pretty on board with. It was about establishing the characters and the world, and del Toro and his cowriter, Vanessa Taylor, do a good job of laying out everything from Elisa's domestic existence in the dual apartments over a movie theater to the workings of the lab, including the wide-eyed scientist Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg). The only wrong note is Shannon himself as Strickland. I don't think he's supposed to come off as so thoroughly an awkward weirdo (the whole washing his hands in the bathroom bit is an argument against that, but still), but Shannon cannot play warm and charming. There do seem to be moments where he's supposed to be playing warm and charming, and he just comes off as veiled and threatening. He's honestly just wrong for the part, and I think someone like Jon Hamm would have done much better like his role in Baby Driver.

Anyway, the Amphibian Man is being tortured by Strickland for...unclear purposes. It's supposedly about something dealing with the Space Race, the specimen's ability to breath in and out of water being key to going to space (I think this detail is actually borrowed from one of the Creature films, but I can't say for sure without digging, and I don't feel like doing that), and it is another one of those issues I have with the film. It exists in this space between the cheesy plots of 50s monster/sci-fi movies that never made much sense and this earnest attempt to update it to a more modern sensibility. When the plot mechanics end up being silly nonsense that can be dismissed with a handwave while everything else is treated so seriously, it creates this discordant effect that jars with the more serious stuff (the characters and romance and threat) around it.

That also leads back to Strickland who is cartoonishly evil. I think he kind of needs to be for the plot to move as quickly as it does, but I was often comparing him to Captain Vidal in Pan's Labyrinth, an actual Spanish fascist with more depth and interesting wrinkles than this guy who puts his bloodied, gauzed hand over his wife's mouth to shut her up while he's having sex with her or is so easy to let out his talk of racial superiority to Zelda's face. He's so thoroughly unappealing as to be uncompelling. And, to make me roll my eyes even more, the one good guy in the lab, Hoffstetler, ends up being a Soviet spy. I mean, whatever. Sure, his Soviet handlers end up just as bad as Strickland, but sure, the people who ran the Holodomor are just as bad as the US military. Okay. Moving on.

What ends up irritating me in smaller snippets throughout, though, are the coincidences that drive the plot. They're everywhere from, after Elisa gets the Amphibian Man out of the facility and into her flat, he ends up running off, and she can only find him by happening to find perfectly placed handprints to show where he is. Or how, in a key moment with military personnel in the room to describe their next steps with the specimen, Elisa is not only in the room, she is only spotted by the one person who wouldn't turn her in. Or, when Strickland is in his final chase and has no clues on where to go next, he just happens to find the exact place where Elisa is going. It's just too many little coincidences that add up to a script that honestly needed another polish to iron some of this stuff out.

And that leads me to the film's visuals, which are largely a treat (for all of my issues with the script and Shannon's performance, del Toro has lost none of his visual acumen), but they sometimes don't make a whole lot of sense in ways that kind of call out that they don't make sense. Namely, I'm thinking of the bit when Elisa fills her entire bathroom with water so that she and the Amphibian Man can swim naked in it. It's a nice moment in a vacuum, but then del Toro expands it out to show the door leaking everywhere and even the water going through the floor to the theater below, and I just started thinking about how the thin layer of tile and the boards that formed her floor could not carry that much weight. Suddenly, the reality of water in a space like that came out in ways that I don't think del Toro intended. He wanted magical, and I started thinking of supporting planks because of what del Toro showed me.

That's the one visual I have a problem with, though, the rest of the movie is gorgeous and doesn't break itself doing it. The deep greens of the images combined with del Toro's strong framing and propensity for fairy tale imagery works quite well in the film. The performances beyond Shannon are also quite good. Hawkins is, of course, the standout as the mute who finally finds love with a fishman, but I always appreciate Michael Stuhlbarg whenever he pops into a movie.

In the end, this almost feels like an attempt to mimic del Toro rather than an actual del Toro movie. Plotting is too off. Characterization is too one-note. But, it looks good and has some good performances. I actually do like the first act, but how everything ends up playing out and the thinness of the antagonist ends up weighing the film down so much that by the end I'm not swept up in the romantic gestures and resolutions by the end. I'm just tired of the machinations that never felt right.