During escalating Cold War in the early 1960s, a mute and lonely Elisa works
as a cleaning lady at a high-security government laboratory where she discovers
a new specimen, a mysterious marine creature. While Elisa becomes drawn to it,
the facility head Richard Strickland only desires to take the creature apart to gain
a scientific edge over the Soviets with the same dominance he exerts over his wife.
His sickening ways are outweighed by Elisa’s black co-worker, Zelda, and gay
neighbour, Giles, who provide much of the film’s comedic relief through their
embodiment and subversion of the era’s stereotypes.  Shot in a rich, stylised palette
of greens and browns, set partly above an old but working cinema and filled with little
visual effects, this other-worldly fable by master story teller Guillermo del Toro is hardly
a fantasy. In essence, it is a film about tolerance, an allegory for all of history’s outcasts
that attempts to shine a light on the conditions from which real monsters are born.