Directed by Guillermo del Toro / Screenplay by Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor

Nominated for no fewer than thirteen Academy Awards, of which it won four including Best Picture, Guillermo del Toro’s evocative parable of human intolerance was one of the critical and commercial smashes of 2017, recouping its $19.5 million budget ten times over. The Shape of Water evolved out of negotiations to remake the classic 1954 monster movie The Creature from the Black Lagoon, a film that del Toro had loved as a boy; but Universal executives rejected his proposal to explore the story from the Creature’s perspective, and to introduce a reciprocal romance with the female lead. When the project was abandoned, del Toro developed his ideas further into a brand new screenplay, although his design concepts for the ‘Amphibian Man’ retained their homage to the Black Lagoon franchise. The Shape of Water is set during the Cold War of the 1960s, but del Toro described it as ‘a movie about our problems today, and about demonising the other, and about fearing or hating the other, and how that is a much more destructive position than learning to love and understand. So if I say once upon a time in 1962, it becomes a fairytale for our troubled times.’ Captured from a South American river and subjected to brutal experiments by the military, the non-verbal Amphibian Man (Doug Jones) finds a soulmate in another outsider, the facility’s mute janitor Elisa (Sally Hawkins). As Rolling Stone’s reviewer observed: ‘Even as the film plunges into tragedy, the core relationship between these two unlikely lovers holds us in thrall.’ When Elisa hatches a plot to free the Amphibian Man from his tormentors, events spiral towards a fantastical climax.

Framed Dimensions: 330mm x 410mm

Acrylic on 230gsm Winsor & Newton canvas paper
Glazed, mounted and framed

Supplied with signed letter of authenticity from Barnaby.