Every now and then, a strange forgotten chapter of life during Covid will interrupt my thoughts. Remember when we used to fake happy hour merriment on the Houseparty app? Or when Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor made an unwatchably awful film about stealing diamonds from Harrods during lockdown? Or how about when people developed an unhealthy obsession with a Netflix documentary about a man with an unhealthy obsession with an octopus?
The unavoidability of My Octopus Teacher led to everything from a creepy spike in people googling “did octopus teacher sex with octopus” (time-saver: he didn’t) to an unforgivably undeserved Oscar win for best documentary (Collective, you were robbed) and then, while not a direct on-record inspiration, it at least paved the way for the success of Shelby Van Pelt’s best-selling novel Remarkably Bright Creatures in 2022. The book, which hinges on the bond between an elderly cleaner and a grumpy octopus, gave those still yearning for more octopus teaching a gentle summer read with no weird questions needing to be asked and now, inevitably, the adaptation lands on Netflix to be filed in the growing “inspiring octopus movie” section.
It’s a film that can also sit in the streamer’s row of originals aimed at an older audience, alongside gentle afternoon watches like Nonnas, Our Souls at Night, Juanita and Otherhood. Like those films it welcomes in an actor we haven’t seen as much lately as we once did – Sally Field in this instance – and grants her more screen time than she has been given in over a decade – her last lead role was 2015’s Hello, My Name Is Doris. I’m not sure how much of the film would really work without her anchoring it – she adds volume to what’s otherwise a pretty low-level hum – but with Field smoothly moving between comedy and drama in a film that can’t always move quite so gracefully, it all just about stays afloat.
Field is Tova, a cleaner at an aquarium in a picturesque coastal town who struggles to connect with those around her, still tending to the wound she endured after the death of her son years earlier. She now prefers being alone, something she has in common with Marcellus, an elderly octopus voiced by Dr Octopus himself, Alfred Molina. He hates humans, an understandable response to being trapped in a tank by them, but he appreciates the relative calm of Tova who talks to him in detail about her life. When Tova injures her foot, she’s forced to reconsider her solitude with calls from the head of a retirement community where her late husband reserved them space finally needing an answer.
Her loneliness is also interrupted by the arrival of Cameron (Lewis Pullman) a wannabe rocker who starts working alongside her. The pair initially clash, but when Tova realises what they have in common, their lives both stunted by grief and a sense of feeling unmoored, they strike up a friendship, with help from Marcellus.
Held together by Molina’s typically commanding voiceover, Remarkably Bright Creatures is a simple, heart-first drama of broken people trying to put themselves back together. It unfolds leisurely without much in the way of surprise, a minor win for director Olivia Newman after her commercially successful yet often laughably absurd adaptation of another hit book, the Reese Witherspoon-smothered melodrama Where the Crawdads Sing. This is a far less busy film with a tighter focus and a far more entertaining one as a result. I’d argue that the focus could be even tighter at times with some underdeveloped romantic subplots never really amounting to much (Colm Meaney for Field and the charming, but forever underused Sofia Black D’Elia for Pullman) and some stretched sitcom plotting that often turns grounded characters into buffoons, but when tasked with the straighter emotional beats, Field is as compelling, and at times heartbreaking, as ever. Too few films allow older female characters to wrestle with both the ghosts of their past and the fears of their future without treating them like punchlines or figures to be patronised, and while there’s certainly room for more specificity, it does give an often overly formulaic film a more distinctive flavour.
Assistance in that department also comes from Molina’s octopus, who isn’t always made to feel like a natural element of the story (there’s a stretch when it seems like Newman has forgotten about him entirely), but when he’s brought back to the forefront in the final act, there’s a neatly contrived yet sweetly effective and emotionally earned ending, If Newman doesn’t quite get the tears she’s clearly craving, she manages to leave us charmed enough for it not to matter all that much. Remarkable might be a stretch, but decent will do.
