Netflix has turned Shelby Van Pelt’s best-selling novel Remarkably Bright Creatures into a film, and the result is an easily digestible, sweet-natured afternoon watch built around Sally Field, an elderly octopus and a lonely woman learning to let people in.
Field plays Tova, a cleaner at an aquarium in a picturesque coastal town, where she spends her days moving through familiar routines and talking at length to Marcellus, the elderly octopus voiced by Alfred Molina. Tova has been isolated for years after the death of her son, and her private conversations with Marcellus become a way to sort through grief she has never fully outrun. The film gives that bond the same gentle oddity that helped make the 2022 novel a success, while keeping the story firmly centered on a woman who has built a life around solitude and is finally being pushed to reconsider it.
That pressure arrives in more than one form. Tova injures her foot and is forced to slow down, just as a retirement community where her late husband had reserved them space finally needs an answer. The injury is practical, but it also cracks open the habits that have kept her at a distance from other people. Into that space comes Cameron, a wannabe rocker played by Lewis Pullman, who starts working alongside Tova. The two clash at first, then gradually form a friendship that becomes one of the film’s warmest threads.
Olivia Newman directs the adaptation, bringing the story to Netflix after previously handling the film version of Where the Crawdads Sing. Field’s casting gives the project added weight: Remarkably Bright Creatures Movie marks her first lead role since 2015’s Hello, My Name Is Doris, and she uses the part to play Tova as stubborn, precise and quietly funny rather than merely mournful. Molina’s Marcellus adds a dry intelligence to scenes that might otherwise tip into gimmick, and the script keeps returning to the strange comfort of a woman who says more to an octopus than she does to most of the people around her.
The film also fits neatly into Netflix’s run of older-audience originals, alongside titles such as Nonnas, Our Souls at Night, Juanita and Otherhood. That matters because the platform has built a lane for modest, character-led stories that do not need franchise machinery to find viewers. The comparison to My Octopus Teacher hangs over the film as well, not because the two stories are alike in form, but because both understand how quickly audiences will respond when an unexpected relationship becomes the emotional center of the story.
What keeps the adaptation from feeling merely tender is its refusal to treat Tova’s loneliness as a fixed condition. The injury, the retirement-community decision and Cameron’s arrival all force movement where there had been none, and that is the film’s real engine. By the end, Remarkably Bright Creatures Movie is less about the novelty of an octopus talking back than about what happens when a woman who has spent years surviving alone is finally nudged toward a life that includes other people.
