So the thing about Guillermo del Toro movies is that they look stylish as hell, they’re drowning in atmosphere, and so they seem like they should be really smart and deep. Only… they’re not.

I mean, okay, I haven’t seen all of his movies, but it’s true of the ones I have seen; and most importantly for what I’m saying here, it’s definitely true of this movie.

Fundamentally, this is just E.T.: Someone stumbles on an alien life form, and gives it food to become friends with it, and they eventually learn how to communicate at a basic level. Meanwhile, the government wants to kidnap and harm that alien, so our protagonist and their friends need to spirit it away from the government and get it back home. Oh, and the alien can glow and heal people by touching them, and everyone’s going to learn a little bit about life along the way.

Seriously, it’s extremely just E.T.… except that the protagonist here is an adult woman who gets naked, masturbates, and (later) has sex with the alien, which thankfully did not happen in E.T. This of course means that it’s in the shape of a love story rather than a boy-and-his-friend story, but it’s still similar enough that if this had come out two years after E.T., everyone would be calling it an E.T. knock-off.

So despite some portentous opening/closing narration, there’s nothing really subtle or challenging about this movie. It’s just a straightforward extra-terrestrial action/love story. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, any more than E.T. was bad. The supporting characters are fun, there are some great bits of (surprisingly humorous!) dialogue in it (“They invented cornflakes to prevent masturbation… didn’t work.”), and of course it’s visually great.

When this won the Oscar in 2017, I assumed it was (along with Moonlight the previous year) part of the spate of higher-brow indie winners that would follow (Parasite, Everything Everywhere, Anora, etc.). But no, this is just a classic middle-brow family-friendly (except for all the nudity/sex) Hollywood picture.