Anders Bergstrom’s review published on Letterboxd:
It was better than I expected based on the trailers. It's a gorgeous film, and GDT is so skilled a visual storyteller. While some people might be turned off by the film's conflation of the fantasies of fairy tale with sexual fixation, I think it offers some interesting ground to explore (so many fairy tales are filled with sexual undertones).
All that said, what positions this as a lesser-del Toro for me is that this film never met a subtext that it didn't want to make into an explicit part of the text. It is cartoonishly broad at times. The film never, ever has you wondering where your sympathies should lie or where you stand in relation to the narrative. There is no mystery. And for me, that drains the film of a significant amount of drama.
It's shocking to me that this was nominated for Best Picture. Not because there haven't been loads of films far worse nominated before, but because this is so clearly part of the comic-book/monster-movie end of del Toro's film oeuvre, even if it's been positioned on the prestige pic end. I understand that del Toro is a very sincere person and I love his heart, but this plays better as a psychosexual fantasy of liberation than a serious statement on the times we live in.