Spoilers ahead.
As The Shape of Water continues to bask in its four Oscar wins, including Best Picture, a theory about its lead female character, Elisa (Sally Hawkins), has been making waves (sorry) in recent days. And it might just make you feel better about the fishy ending. Recall: after Elisa is shot by the colonel (Michael Shannon), the fish man (Doug Jones) takes her into the river with him, somehow gives her gills, and the two embrace as a voiceover tells you they (probably) lived "happily ever after." It's a murky and dark ending that never really confirms their fate. Do they really live "happily ever after" underwater or is this just an imagination of Elisa and her fish man?
Consider Paul Tassi's theory suggested in a recent Forbes article: just like the fish man, Elisa is part fish, and there's plenty of evidence to support this. For starters, Elisa was found in a river and orphaned as a baby. She loves water – so much that she has a daily routine of masturbating in a bath and later, has sex with the fish man underwater (in her bathroom, after she floods it with water). And then there are the slashes on her neck. As Tassi points out, if we are to believe the fish man has "restorative" powers, he is actually re-opening the gills, not slashes, on her neck. And if Elisa is part fish, she never had a human voice to begin with, thus explaining her need to use sign language to communicate with humans.
The theory also appeared on Reddit this week, so you know things are getting serious. If some viewers thought the movie's main romantic relationship felt sudden or forced, now seeing Elisa as part fish should be somewhat comforting. As Reddit user Caerul writes, Elisa "felt a primal kinship with him, instinctively, and was immediately drawn in." In short, they were always meant to be together.
In December, director Guillermo del Toro hinted at the origins of Elisa's character, which makes the theory even more solid. In an interview with Deadline, del Toro revealed that when he approached Sally Hawkins for the role (he wrote it with her in mind), she, too, had been working on her own story about a woman who discovered she was actually a mermaid. "It was so beautiful that we were on the same wavelength," he said. "I asked her if I could use this idea that she had scars on her neck that turned out to be gills." He also offered this (you can almost picture him saying it with a wink and a nudge): "She allowed me to use another detail she had, which was that the character used a lot of salt to make the water in her bathtub habitable."
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