It can’t be an accident that The Story of Ruth is invoked in The Shape of Water, a film about the kind of love in which we both abandon ourselves and discover our true selves in the same moment. The devotion it expresses - love that transcends the speaker’s home, family, and beliefs about the world - is the purest distillation of what it is to fall in love and give oneself over to the commitment that entails. The words are spoken between a widow and her mother-in-law, but most people know the passage as a familiar reading at weddings. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark

May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.”

Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. “For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. “Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you,” Ruth says. The most famous passage from the Book of Ruth is when Ruth, who is a Moabite, entreats her Jewish mother-in-law, Naomi, to let her come to Israel with her, even after Ruth’s husband (Naomi’s son) has passed away. That movie shows up several times in The Shape of Water, playing in the background of scenes and advertised on the Orpheum’s marquee, and though it doesn’t serve as del Toro’s primary symbolism, its story lurks around the edges of his film. It is 1960, and the theater is playing The Story of Ruth, Henry Koster’s biblical epic. The camera pans down and across the theater’s marquee. The opening shots of Guillermo del Toro’s gorgeous romance-fantasy The Shape of Water show Eliza ( Sally Hawkins) going about her morning routine - boiling eggs, bathing, brushing her shoes, visiting her neighbor Giles ( Richard Jenkins) before work - in her dingy but charming apartment above the Orpheum movie theater.

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