Tova Sullivan still sets out two coffee cups in the morning. One has been hers for forty-one years. The other belonged to a husband who is dead and a son who has been gone for thirty. She does the night-cleaning shift at a small Puget Sound aquarium because that is when the building is empty enough to be honest about it, and because the only witness to her work is a giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus who, in the novel and now in the film, narrates parts of the story in the literal first person.

Olivia Newman’s adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt’s bestselling debut arrives with a surface premise built for the kind of Netflix drama meant to be watched with tea: an older woman befriends a clever cephalopod, finds joy, and uncovers a mystery. The trailer sells this. The marketing leans into the warm voice of Alfred Molina playing Marcellus, into Sally Field’s familiarity, into a tagline about wonder. None of this is wrong. None of it is what the film is actually doing.

The octopus is not Tova’s friend. He is the only character in her life who cannot leave the tank, cannot lie to her face, and cannot disappear into the water near a ferry the way her son Erik did in 1989. Marcellus is the relationship she can risk because the risk has already been priced in. He is captive. He cannot vanish without explanation. He cannot, by the architecture of his existence, do the thing every other person in her life has already done. The film’s argument — quiet, novelistic, never spoken aloud — is that you cannot offer wonder to a person who has already buried theirs until you have first offered them a witness who cannot betray them. Marcellus is that witness. Cameron, the wandering young man Lewis Pullman plays with the right amount of unwashed flatness, only becomes possible after the octopus has done his work.

This is what the novel was always about and what most reviews of the novel got wrong. Van Pelt’s structural decision — letting Marcellus narrate chapters in the first person, with literal interiority — was not a charming device. It was a claim about what kind of attention grief requires once humans have stopped being able to give it. Newman’s adaptation translates the device into voice-over, and the architectural function is identical. Every time the film cuts to Marcellus’s perspective, the editing argues a single proposition: the cleaner, the new young man, and the missing son are continuous events in one being’s attention. Marcellus does not see them as separate stories. The film, by privileging his point of view at structural inflection points, does not either.

Newman has done this work before. Where the Crawdads Sing, her 2022 theatrical adaptation of another bestselling novel about a woman in nature carrying unspoken grief, established a craft signature: she trusts a slow human face longer than streaming audiences are supposed to tolerate. She does not cut on emotion. She lets a take run past the point where Netflix’s reverse-engineering of viewer attention would suggest the audience drops off. The bet is that if the face is doing the work, the audience stays. Remarkably Bright Creatures doubles down on this bet. It also extends it to a non-human face. Connor’s cinematography frames the aquarium as an inverse cathedral — light rising up through water rather than falling through stained glass — and shoots almost every conversation Tova has with another human through some kind of glass barrier. The bus window. The kitchen window. The diner glass. Only Marcellus is filmed without one. The film makes its argument at the level of camera placement, never at the level of script: the only unmediated relationship Tova has is with the animal who literally lives behind glass.

Sally Field at seventy-nine plays grief as competence, not collapse. This is the film’s central performance choice and its hardest. Tova does not cry on screen for the first half of the film. She cleans. She refills the snack jar. She tells the Knitwits — the friend group played by Kathy Baker, Beth Grant and the others — that she is fine. The performance is built out of the smallness of the gestures she will not let herself stop making: the second coffee cup, the way she straightens a chair after a man has left it, the way her hand passes over a tank where Erik once reached in. Field at this point in her career has earned the audience’s permission to do this kind of work. Younger actresses cannot, because the audience reads stillness in younger faces as opacity rather than accumulation. The performance is also a quiet rebuke to the industry assumption that a woman over seventy-five cannot carry a feature film alone. Field carries it, and the carrying looks effortless because she is doing the thing the role requires, which is to hide the work.

Molina’s voice work is the third craft signature, and it is the one most likely to be misread. The marketing has been running it as a Doc Ock joke — the Spider-Man 2 actor with four mechanical tentacles now voicing an animal with eight real arms — and the joke is in bad faith. Molina plays Marcellus as the most honest first-person narrator the film has, which means he plays him as the only character whose interiority the film can guarantee. The voice is dry, slightly amused, never sentimental. It is a deliberate refusal to do the thing audiences expect when an actor voices an animal in a feel-good drama. The craft argument is that Marcellus is a person, played by a person, and the film expects the audience to take this seriously enough that the voice cannot be cute.

The film exists inside a culture that has had to learn the word for older-women loneliness in public for the first time. The U.S. Surgeon General has named loneliness a public health emergency. The social architecture that used to give a sixty-five-year-old widow a third place to walk into has been hollowed out — the lodges, the church groups, the bridge clubs, the workplaces that retained older women into their seventies. Tova’s third place is the aquarium, after closing, when nobody is in the building. That is not a fantasy. It is a documentary observation about who is left in the room when the social architecture has been hollowed out, and the demographic that read Van Pelt’s novel for sixty-four weeks on the bestseller list recognized itself in the observation before the public health emergency had a name. The film arrives at the moment when this recognition has become culturally legible, and the audience that recognizes itself in Tova does so faster than the film expects.

There is a second cultural current the film inherits: the decade-long mainstream rehabilitation of cephalopod cognition. The Soul of an Octopus in 2015, My Octopus Teacher in 2020, the steady scientific consensus that octopus intelligence is genuinely other-minded — distributed across nine brains, capable of problem-solving, possibly experiencing something the human language for consciousness cannot quite reach. The film inherits cultural permission to grant Marcellus interiority without arguing for it. A film made in 1995 would have had to spend twenty minutes earning the right to take an octopus seriously as a person. This one does not. That permission is itself a cultural artifact, and the film uses it carefully — it does not over-claim what Marcellus knows, but it never apologizes for what he sees.

What the film cannot promise is that the bond saves anyone. The mystery the marketing teases — the discovery Marcellus helps Tova uncover — does not return Erik to her. It explains him. The explanation is not the same thing as the return. Cameron’s father remains absent in the way that fathers who leave are absent: even when found, even when named, the absence is not undone by the presence. And Marcellus, by his species’ biology, will die. Giant Pacific octopuses live three to five years. Tova meets him already mature. The film does not hide this. It builds toward it. The return of wonder, in this film, is not the return of what was lost. It is the discovery that wonder remains structurally possible after the worst loss the protagonist could imagine. That is a smaller claim than the marketing makes. It is also a more honest one, and the film stakes its emotional credibility on the audience accepting that the smaller claim is enough.

Whether it is enough is the question the film hands to the viewer in the final scene and refuses to answer. This is the work the film has been doing all along, and the audience that finishes it will recognize the work whether they have a vocabulary for it or not.

Remarkably Bright Creatures - Netflix — Remarkably Bright Creatures – Netflix

Remarkably Bright Creatures arrives on Netflix on May 8, directed by Olivia Newman from a screenplay she co-wrote with John Whittington, with additional literary material by Katie Silberman. Sally Field plays Tova Sullivan, Lewis Pullman plays Cameron, and Alfred Molina voices Marcellus, alongside Colm Meaney as Ethan, Joan Chen, Kathy Baker, Beth Grant, Sofia Black-D’Elia and Laura Harris. Ashley Connor handled cinematography. The film runs one hour and fifty-one minutes and is rated PG-13 for thematic material, language, suggestive references and brief drug use.

It is adapted from Shelby Van Pelt’s 2022 debut novel, which spent more than sixty-four weeks on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list and more than thirty weeks on the trade paperback list. Production, by Night Owl Stories — Bryan Unkeless and Peter Craig — and Anonymous Content’s David Levine for Netflix Studios, wrapped in Vancouver in May 2025; Deep Cove, Panorama Park and Cates Park stood in for the novel’s Puget Sound setting. The film streams globally on Netflix from the premiere date.

Sally Field plays a widow whose only honest relationship is with an octopus in Netflix’s Remarkably Bright Creatures

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