The Shape of Water (2017)

  Merry Christmas Eve!  Here a movie about fish people!

Eliza (Sally Hawkins) is a mute cleaning lady working at a government research lab.  Her life is routine but enjoyable.  Then a new asset, a humanoid amphibian (Doug Jones) captured in the Amazon, is brought in to be studied for secrets that could help the U.S. get a man on the moon before those pesky Russkies.  Eliza feels a strange affinity for the captive creature and starts befriending him.  This fascinates the lead researcher Dr. Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlberg), but brings Eliza straight into the crosshairs of Strickland (Michael Shannon), the head of security.  When Strickland decides that the creature needs to be destroyed, Eliza embarks on a desperate plan to rescue him.

This has been described as Guillermo Del Toro's vision of a fairy tale and there are a lot of shades of Pan's Labyrinth here.  It is very much a romance, but it's also a love letter to the Golden Age of Hollywood and a sharp criticism of political and religious hypocrisy.  It shouldn't work but it does.

Hawkins is excellent here and no one plays a fish-man like Doug Jones.  This is a top-notch cast working with solid material.  I didn't full-out love it but I feel like this is a film meant to be seen over and over.

But for the love of God, don't go see this with your mom unless you know she is totally okay with a lady getting down with a fish-dude.  I felt so bad for the dude next to me who took his mom out for a nice Christmas Eve bonding at the movies and had to deal with some light bestiality instead.  Nothing explicit, but way more than just implied.  That's gotta be awkward.  The old couple to my left was pretty traumatized.  But they were also annoying so fuck 'em.  The future is now!  And it contains mer-sex!