Remarkably Bright Creatures Sally Field Lewis Pullman Netflix Film Review

Have you seen the tenderhearted fantasy drama about a lonely cleaning lady at a government facility who forms an intense emotional bond with an intelligent aquatic creature confined to a tank and desperate to escape?

No, it’s not Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water,” but “Remarkably Bright Creatures,” a new feature adapted from the bestselling 2022 novel by Shelby Van Pelt. This time, the central relationship is platonic—and thank goodness, because the aquatic creature is a wise elderly octopus named Marcellus who also narrates the action (via Alfred Molina‘s voice-over). I’m not sure who would want to watch him get busy with the overnight cleaning lady (Sally Field) who talks to him while she’s cleaning kids’ handprints off the glass—except maybe del Toro, the world’s biggest H.P. Lovecraft fan.

 

Olivia Newman (“Where the Crawdads Sing“), who directed this film and co-wrote the script (with John Whittington), is after something more sedate and traditionally heartwarming. She achieves it. “Remarkably Bright Creatures” is solid family entertainment: think of a Hallmark movie built about people healing their psychic wounds in a cute little town.

Field’s character, Tovah, is a widow still grieving the loss of her husband and their teenage son, who died out on a lake maybe 30 years ago in what everyone in town assumes was a suicide. She’s kind and decent and badly in need of something that will kick her out of the rut she’s been in.

That something arrives in the form of an unemployed musician named Cameron who is in town to find the father he’s never met. He lives in the shabby camper van that used to belong to his mom, a drug addict who died of an overdose. He’s played by Lewis Pullman, who’s Bill Pullman’s son, and looks and sounds so much like his dad that watching him in might make you feel as if you’ve time-traveled back to the 1990s. He’s excellent: understated and natural. He does his own guitar playing and singing and is skilled enough to convince you that he was in a pretty good band once.

Tovah’s trio of longtime friends is cast with actresses so seasoned and innately appealing (Kathy Baker, Joan Chen, and Beth Grant) that if Field—still a sneakily powerful star—weren’t playing the lead, you could easily imagine one of them stepping in for her. Colm Meaney plays the goodhearted, music-loving shopkeeper who’s sweet on Tovah but doesn’t realize it until someone else points it out. Sofia Black-D’Elia plays Avery, the smart-alecky but soulful owner of a surf shop who charms Cameron with her beauty and sass, and has an agonizing secret that will drive him away for a bit so he can download the elders’ wisdom and return to her as Cameron 2.0. The best line in the movie belongs to him: “She makes me wanna be on time.”

You can guess where everything and everyone is eventually headed, and you’ll be right. This is a film about an older woman who lost a husband and son, and is presented with ideal candidates to fill those vacancies; a kind and funny single man in the heroine’s age range who lives in town and has known her forever; and an embittered early thirtysomething man-child who lost his mother and never knew his father (who is rumored to be a local mogul whose inner circle is too tight to breach).

It’s a project brimming with talent, including cinematographer Ashley Connor, whose images find that sweet spot between reality and enchantment. But it doesn’t trust the audience to handle the story’s melancholy undercurrents, much less sit with painful moments of reflection and subplots that, as in life, remain unfinished no matter how hard one might wish for answers. Subtext gets boldfaced through expository dialogue (as when Marcellus says that while he merely wants to escape his tank, “I suspect that what [Tova] needs to escape lies somewhere deeper”). Sometimes Newman brings in the usually excellent composer Dickon Hinchliffe (“Peaky Blinders“) to sweeten uncomfortable moments with underscoring that reassures us, “You’re not sad; this is all part of life’s rich pageant.”

It’s a testament to the actors that they can counteract the movie’s doses of unnecessary saccharine with savory realness. Field, in particular, is so strong throughout, especially in Tovah’s most vulnerable scenes, that you get to experience many of those too-rare magic moments when a movie cuts to a reaction shot of another character, and they’re so awestruck and genuinely moved that you know the performer isn’t doing much acting because they don’t need to; the performer across from them is so brilliant that they only have to watch her work. The narrative’s puzzle pieces keep locking into place in your mind well in advance of the point in the story where they actually join. But the actors always rush in and pull the pieces apart, if only for an instant, as if they’re hellbent on finding out what’s hiding out in negative space.

I’m not sure why this story absolutely needed to be narrated by an octopus, or how much it gains from that approach. But the CGI is so amazing and Molina’s narration so, well, human, that you rarely question the curmudgeonly cephalopod’s authenticity, even when he escapes his tank and crawls across a concrete floor in a laboratory so harshly lit that it ought to spoil the illusion; or wryly describes events he couldn’t possibly have witnessed and Tovah would not have shared with him. The movie expects you to just roll with all this stuff. Or slither. Sometimes you can’t. But when the film escapes the confinement tank of its numerous hand-me-down cliches, you’re happy to follow the water trail to see where it leads.