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“The Shape of Water” is a flow of sumptuous images set to music, a flood tide of feelings with a mythic undertow. Setting out to describe the beauties of Guillermo del Toro’s romantic fable can lead to burbly verbal excesses, since it’s such an exotic, and erotic, mixture: weird science straight out of the comic books; Cold War intrigue; man’s equal-opportunity inhumanity to man plus other species, and a lonely woman’s love for a creature that might have come from a long-ago lagoon.

Until now Mr. Del Toro has been best known…