Was Elisa also not human?
In The Shape of Water, Elisa is an orphan, found near a river. She's mute, and has gill-like scars in her neck. At the end of the movie, the Amphibian Man heals her scars, and they turn to gills. Both live happily ever after.
Now, I assume Guillermo del Toro made this point purposefully cloudy, but maybe there are concise opinions or comments on the topic. Was Elisa also an amphibian girl/god?
She does not speak, is fascinated by water, and her scars get turned into gills. She looks like a human, sure, but she might have turned into a human due to her gender, or due to being out of the water for so long (which caused her gills to close up). Elisa notes during the movie how it seems like both their fates have joined them together, as if they were meant to be.
However, it is possible that the Amphibian Man does not heal, but instead transforms her scars into gills. She is just a mute lonely woman, and she was lucky to meet this creature.
Best Answer
The details you provided indeed suggest Elisa shares similarities with the Amphibious Man, or impart, in the least, an uncertainty about her origins.
In a conversation with Joe Utichi from Deadline, Guillermo del Toro emphasized the aquatic nature of Sally Hawkins' character:
She (Sally Hawkins) had been writing her own story about a woman who didn’t know she was a mermaid. She and del Toro found the coincidence serendipitous. “It was so beautiful that we were on the same wavelength,” del Toro says. “I asked her if I could use this idea that she had scars on her neck that turned out to be gills. She allowed me to use another detail she had, which was that the character used a lot of salt to make the water in her bathtub habitable.” source
Moreover, in an interview with io9, del Toro implied that Elisa is indeed the counterpart of the Amphibious Man:
It (the Amphibious Man) is a river God. It’s not an animal. It’s a river God in the Amazon. There was never another one. There was him and Sally Hawkins put on Earth, and their entire existence they were going to each other. And they didn’t know. She was found in a river. No body knows who her parents were. She has these markings since she was a baby. source
The ambiguity of Elisa's nature was an artistic choice, however, meant to be open to interpretation. As del Toro states in the same article on io9, unlike the characters in his other films, he never fully developed the background story of both the Amphibious Man and Elisa:
There is no larger backstory.
“I write eight-page biographies for most of the characters in the movies,” del Toro said. “I give them to the actors. But my story for the creature is in the movie.”
“The creature largely remains an enigma,” he (co-author Daniel Kraus) said. “And I think Guillermo and I were fairly simpatico with that. Pretty copacetic in our ideas in that the creature be allowed to represent different things to different people.” source
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Why does Elisa have scars on her neck?
We know Elisa was found as an orphaned child with cuts on her neck that slashed her voice box and made her unable to speak. We know she grows up and eventually falls in love with the amphibious creature, who turns her scars into gills in the finale so they can live happily ever after underwater.How did Elisa get gills?
Recall: after Elisa is shot by the colonel (Michael Shannon), the fish man (Doug Jones) takes her into the river with him, somehow gives her gills, and the two embrace as a voiceover tells you they (probably) lived \u201chappily ever after.\u201d It's a murky and dark ending that never really confirms their fate.How did Elisa get her scars?
Guillermo del Toro's film follows a mute woman named Elisa who works in a government laboratory in Baltimore during the height of the Cold War. As an infant, Elisa was found on the side of a river with her throat slashed, which rendered her speechless and gave her three large scars along the side of her neck.Is Elisa deaf in The Shape of Water?
Elisa (Sally Hawkins), the young janitress who falls in love with our amphibious otherworldly creature (Doug Jones) in the government laboratory, is mute. She doesn't speak, but she isn't deaf. In fact, Elisa hears everything.Elisa - \
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