Remarkably Bright Creatures (now on Netflix) may test your capacity for omniscient octopi voiced by actors who once played Dr. Octopus. The latest in what Netflix probably should tag “cephalopod content” (which would also include Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher and a couple of SpongeBob movies) features Alfred Molina as the voice of an aging aquarium octopus whose bestie is an aging aquarium-cleaning lady played by Sally Field. Director Olivia Newman tackles another literary adaptation (she helmed 2022’s Where the Crawdads Sing), this time turning Shelby Van Pelt’s bestseller of the same title into a warm, diverting family-ish drama, which may win you over in spite of its schmaltzy, tryhard tearjerkerisms. And Field might just have something to do with that. 

REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Relatively recent scientific studies tell us that octopi are among Earth’s more intelligent creatures, potentially as smart as dogs or a three-year-old human. Whether that makes them viable psychotherapists is still up in the air – more on that in a minute. Marcellus is an elderly eight-armer in a public aquarium in a quaint little oceanside town in the Pacific Northwest. He’s restless in his old age, repeatedly escaping his tank for adventures around the facility, before he either squeezes back in on his own or is rescued and returned to the nourishing water. He speaks in diary-style voiceover via Molina, expressing his views of humans as intellectual primitives, and his desire for freedom. He says things like “To be at their mercy is humbling,” and shares a story about the peace he felt in a cozy cranny at the bottom of the ocean. Notably, the audience, never the characters, are privy to his musings. 

Maybe that’s too bad, because it seems some of them could use Marcellus’ sage and worldly advice. Take the woman who cleans his tank and talks to him to alleviate her loneliness: Tova (Field), a 70ish widow who handles night janitorial duties at the aquarium, likely avoiding retirement so she doesn’t acquire staring-at-the-four-walls syndrome. Her son died decades prior, and she’s never gotten over the loss or the mysterious nature of it; she bristles at the town gossips who cavalierly throw around the word “suicide.” “We both dream of the bottom of the sea, and what we lost there,” Marcellus says as he shows Tova signs of affection, whether splaying himself on the glass of his habitat or reaching his tentacles out of the water to hold her hands. As smart as this octopus is, he clearly has yet to realize that therapists charge, like, $165 an hour, because if he did, he’d have bought his way outta that joint by now.

One day, a genial quasi-drifter in a cruddy old camper van rolls into town with a busted radiator. That’s Cameron (Lewis Pullman), a wayward wannabe musician, 30ish, orphaned by his addict mother, looking for his deadbeat father. He has no means of paying for car repairs, but Mr. Serendipitous Q. Kismet intervenes when Tova sprains her ankle and Cameron is hired to be her temporary replacement. Marcellus calls them “the cleaning lady” and “the juvenile,” and he and you and I and everyone quickly snap the puzzle pieces together when we realize Cameron’s missing a mother figure and Tova’s missing a son figure. 

Both characters have Stuff To Deal With. Tova wrestles with her outsider status in town, considers selling her gorgeous log-cabin home to move to a retirement facility and goes on a date for tea with the local age-appropriate shopkeep (Colm Meaney). And Cameron tries to put a dent in Dad Search ’26, flirts with a local cute paddleboarder lady (Sofia Black D’Elia) and gradually warms to Tova’s exacting methods of keeping the aquarium tip-top. Meanwhile, Marcellus captain’s-logs his way through the movie by saying stuff like “Day 1,423 of my captivity,” before dropping nuggets of fortune-cookie wisdom about human behavior. Leave it to a creature with eight sticky arms to bring people together in a big soppy-wet metaphorical hug, right?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Anyone who found fluffy Netflix fodder like Nonnas too edgy, I refer you to Remarkably Bright Creatures. It’s also Field’s first toplining role since 2015’s Hello My Name is Doris, another instance of the wily old pro elevating so-so screenplays to something a little more substantial (see also: Lily Tomlin’s turn in the underappreciated Grandma), which leads us to… 

Performance Worth Watching: Field! Of course. She wisely injects Tova with some welcome eccentricity in the margins of treacly material, unafraid to render her character prickly and complex, and independent from aging-woman cliches.

Sex And Skin: None.

Our Take: No spoilers, but I spent the entire length of Remarkably Bright Creatures whimpering pathetically to the movie gods for it to not end like Old Yeller or Marley and Me. Except with an octopus. Instead of a dog. In fact, there’s less emphasis on Marcellus than you might think; if he was a real high-functioning octopus instead of a composite of CGI and nature-doc footage, he might be offended that he’s less a character and more of a plot device, a catalyst for the surrogate parent-child relationship at the core of the film. The octopus is a cloying gimmick, and anthropomorphism that’s disproportionate to the context generally makes me itch in hard-to-reach places (talking animals are far more acceptable in cartoons or “heightened reality” stuff like Babe), but it takes a real you-know-what not to be at least modestly charmed by this mollusk’s contrived, harmless antics.

It certainly helps that Field and Pullman’s individual performances and collective chemistry is strong – strong enough to compel us to weather some clunky dialogue, and perhaps the uber-cornball tearjerker ending as well, which has our eyes rolling at the same time they’re leaking. I normally get mad when a movie preys on the audience’s involuntary emotional reactions, but the two leads smooth that over, finding warmth and purpose in the dynamic between Tova and Cameron. They work together like a slightly ill-fitting glove on a cold hand, imperfect but with gentle warmth symbiotic to each other’s emotional needs. 

The parallels between Marcellus and Tova are a bit too literary in an airport-novel sense – they’re at similar stages of their lives, you know – but they work in deference to the story’s simple and direct themes about home, belonging and the inevitability and necessity of change. Field’s plaintive performance works so well, her character’s festering heartache is prevalent even when she’s talking to a blank spot where a CGI octopus will be rendered in post-production. The old who-saved-who animal-human relationship dynamic is a cliche, but it maintains its poignancy here. I mean, if anyone can make that hoary old trope work with the hands-down weirdest creature on the planet, it’s Sally frickin’ Field.

Our Call: Remarkably Bright Creatures might just wear down your inner curmudgeon, if he’s a bit bored on a Sunday and has a soft spot for erudite octopi. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.