10 Movie Endings That Are Secretly Depressing
7. The Shape Of Water
Plot:
A dark fairy tale, The Shape of Water by del Toro, is a visually stunning mix of romance and fantasy. Elisa, a mute woman, rescues an amphibian humanoid creature being tortured and experimented on by the company she works for as a janitor. She hides him at her house and they fall in love.
Elisa tries to help the creature escape back into the wild, she ends up injured and he magically heals her. We learn the scars on her neck that she's had since she was a baby are actually gills. They disappear together and the narration suggests they live happily ever after.
But Wait...
Because it's a fairy tale the poetic narrative of the ending works. It gets weird if you think about the actual realities of it. We see the story through Elisa's perspective. She loves the Amphibian Man, but we as viewers don't get a very consistent idea of how intelligent or human-like he is in his thinking. He learns some signs but never fully communicates.
He is very animalistic in his mannerisms and in one scene violently kills and eats a cat. It is soon after this pet killing that he and the protagonist have sex.
While Elisa is implied to be of the water herself, she has been raised in the human world and has lived all her life with modern comforts. Does she really want to live forever in the water with her half-feral boyfriend who she can only kind-of communicate with?