Remarkably Bright Creatures has made the move from best-selling novel to Netflix film, bringing Sally Field back to a lead role in a story built around grief, solitude and an octopus who knows more than he lets on. The adaptation, directed by Olivia Newman, follows Tova, a cleaner at an aquarium in a picturesque coastal town, as she tries to live with the loss of her son years earlier.
Field plays Tova with the kind of quiet restraint that helped make the novel by Shelby Van Pelt a best-seller in 2022 into one of those unexpectedly durable crowd favorites. Marcellus, the elderly octopus voiced by Alfred Molina, becomes the character Tova trusts most. She talks to him in detail about her life, and the film uses that unusual bond to keep the story moving when her human connections stall.
The emotional weight arrives early through Tova's routine, then shifts when she injures her foot and is forced to reconsider the isolation that has shaped her days. That injury matters because it pushes her into closer contact with Cameron, a wannabe rocker played by Lewis Pullman who starts working alongside her. Their first meetings are awkward and tense, but the story turns on the fact that they do not stay strangers for long. A separate profile on Pullman's role, Lewis Pullman joins Sally Field in Netflix's Remarkably Bright Creatures, flagged the pairing before the film reached viewers, while another look at the project, Remarkably Bright Creatures Movie brings Sally Field and an octopus to Netflix, pointed to the odd charm of the setup.
That blend of melancholy and gentle uplift is why the film has drawn comparisons to My Octopus Teacher and been folded into Netflix's slate of originals aimed at an older audience. One recent review called it “an easily digestible, sweet-natured afternoon watch,” a fair summary of a film that does not ask for much beyond patience and a little empathy. It also marks a notable return for Field, whose last lead role was in 2015's Hello, My Name Is Doris, and gives her another chance to anchor a story that is really about the slow work of letting other people in.
The result is less a mystery than a reckoning, with Tova's solitude tested not by a grand revelation but by small, human contact. By the end, the film answers its own quiet question: whether a woman who has spent years speaking most freely to an octopus can still find a way back to the living. It says yes.
