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Guillermo del Toro 's latest film The Shape of Water (my  review ) is currently cleaning up with accolades and guild nominations during this awards season. Shape of Water is essentially a love story, with the unique spin being that one of the players is an amphibian who learns to communicate through sign language. After reflecting upon the film during the weeks since I first saw it, I started thinking about a forgotten film from the 2000s, M. Night Shyamalan 's much-maligned Lady in the Water . The unexpected similarities between Shyamalan's bedtime story and del Toro's film were hard to ignore. Both films feature protagonists who are custodians with communication disabilities. In Shape , Sally Hawkins  is a janitor at a government laboratory and a mute. In Lady , Paul Giamatti  is an apartment building superintendent with a bad stutter. They both live lives of solace (Hawkins lives above an old movie theatre and Giamatti lives alone in a tiny pool house). Their l...