31. Guillermo del Toro: Monsters, Melancholy & Questionable Fish Romance

Sean’s director pick for this retrospective leads the FU trio through the shadowy, creature-cluttered corridors of Guillermo del Toro’s filmography, covering everything the Mexican film-maker has produced up to The Shape of Water. It’s a journey of fairy tales, clockwork horrors, comic-book demons… and some very divided opinions. There’s unanimous love for Hellboy and the gloriously kinetic Blade II, and Sean professes his undying devotion to Pan’s Labyrinth. Steven, meanwhile, continues his long-standing vendetta against Pacific Rim. But all three of us unite in our mutual disdain for Crimson Peak, which Steven argues is the final straw in del Toro’s increasingly migraine inducing palette of red, green, and blue lighting. We assess del Toro’s career highs and lows, note his stylistic kinship (and occasional overlap) with Tim Burton, and take The Shape of Water to task, raising eyebrows at its plot inconsistencies and question whether all those awards were truly deserved. By the end, a difficult question emerges: Has del Toro’s golden era come and gone, or is there still magic left in the machinery?