- Like the Roman soldier at the foot of Jesus' cross, Strickland as representative of the patriarchal military, finally recognizes and confesses that the monster is indeed god.
Yes, this film is about our experience of the divine, about God's shape, and omnipresence. It's about baptism, cleansing, and salvific intercourse with the divine. It's about death and resurrection and making it possible for the divine to manifest itself. It's about the work of misfits (and especially women) that enables the divine to fit into a world created by men - specifically by a military committed to the death of God. It's about females cleaning up the messes that men create everywhere, from their bathrooms to the battlefield and the world at large.
As Sally Hawkins clutches her Oscar, watch for those feminist and perhaps even theological themes in her acceptance speech.
In the end, however, The Shape of Water is about the total commitment that the discovery of God provokes. For a moment, as the film concludes, Elisa recovers her voice. She gazes at the monstrous but fascinating object of her love and prays the haunting words of the picture's central air, "You'll Never Know." She whispers:
If I can do one thing more
To prove that I love you,
I swear I don't know how.
You'll never know
If you don't know now.
Would that we could all make that prayer our own!
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