Watch first trailer for Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water

The first trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s new film, The Shape of Water, has landed online and suggests the Mexican director has another stunner on his hands.

This offbeat, Cold War-era horror-romance follows a mute woman named Elisa (Sally Hawkins), who works as a cleaner at a shady government facility, which has a strange fish-man creature (who calls to mind Hellboy's Abe Sapien, voiced by David Hyde Pierce) held in a huge water tank in one of its laboratories. And as the trailer above suggests, love blossoms between the pair.

Alongside Hawkins is one of our favourite actors, Michael Shannon, who plays a mad scientist and head honcho at the top-secret laboratory. Octavia Spencer, Richard Jenkins, Michael Stuhlbarg and Doug Jones also appear in The Shape of Water, which opens 8 Dec in the US and 12 Feb here in the UK. Take a look at the first trailer in the player above.