Is Strickland supposed to be conventionally terrifying or menacing, though? The parodic register is well-spotted; Shannon’s overplaying seems designed to highlight how small his character is. To me he’s a petty creep playing at being a powerful one, not quite a caricature but certainly not a nuanced or charismatic villain. He may enter with bravado and swagger, but it’s pointedly dismantled over the course of the film. Would a terrifying villain be so easily smooth-talked into a teal car?

There's a childishness to it, too, as evidenced by things like his need to prove himself to General Hoyt, his teenage-meaningless profanity, and his self-professed love of candy.

(hey, maybe the mute will feel so alienated from the rest of humanity that she'll want to fuck the fish!)

If you read it as, essentially, beastiality, it gives everything else in the movie a really ugly current- implicitly, it means that her disability has dehumanized her, and that she is interested in acting outside of humanity because she's been so rejected by them.

I don't think that's really a fair read, though- while the world at large is brutal, Hawkins' actual circle of friends is very tight, brought together by their alterity- which again feels Jeunet-esque. I think Del Toro intends the fishman more to be sort of a feral-child level of outsider, remarkable as much for his loneliness and cultural difference as for his physical difference, which in turn means that what's being done to him is that much more intolerable (an act of casual racial murder, one almost one of genocide) and that Jenkins' attraction to him is in seeing him as one of them, one of the core circle of people we spend time with. For me, that mostly works- though I think the Octavia Spencer character feels a bit too stock, in that she's the one who never asks Jenkins for anything, and is just bottomlessly good and giving with no real hesitation. It's not a total stereotype- I think that getting a glimpse of her home life and her showing up at the end of the movie (which makes her feel like a more central character) both work against that- but it's maybe a bit thin.

Also, while I loved Michael Stuhlbarg, the resolution of the espionage subplot makes no sense- if they think he's flipped, why execute him instead of extracting and interrogating him? Why is he suspicious of his handlers in one scene and trusting of them the next? Why does he forget that he's being watched? It's an odd beat, for a movie that otherwise handled the presence of a Russian spy in a compellingly different way- when's the last time that archetype was heroic?

I suppose, technically, it is beastiality, but the style and tone of the film are so firmly rooted in fairy tale form that I took it as more of a reverse “frog and the princess”, where the princess joins her prince by becoming a creature herself (made obvious in the last shot where her old slashed-throat scars that muted her in the first place become gills; her greatest handicap, which had isolated her from most of humanity becoming the one special thing she needs to be with the one person who loves and appreciates her the most. I thought that was a lovely little twist - I had spent most of the run time expecting the film to go the obvious route and end with the fishman restoring her voice as he died.