Remarkably Bright Creatures Review - The Emmy-Winning Octopus Movie
Last night, a Netflix film called Remarkably Bright Creatures that debuted this past May won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie, and in case there was any doubt, know that the recognition was entirely deserved, even if the film’s modest, unassuming surface might initially suggest otherwise.
Director Olivia Newman’s third film after First Match (2018) and Where the Crawdads Sing (2022) is adapted from Shelby Van Pelt’s 2022 novel and could easily have been dismissed as slight – a story about an elderly widow, a directionless young man, and the wiseacre octopus who brings them together, played out with the gentle predictability of a Hallmark movie in structural terms. But the film transcends its own modest ambitions through the specificity of its performances and the genuine emotional intelligence with which it treats grief, loneliness, and the particular terror of aging alone.
Sally Field plays Tova Sullivan, a widow who works nights cleaning an aquarium, and the performance is a reminder of exactly why Field has remained one of American cinema’s most reliably affecting actresses across five decades of work. Tova’s nighttime solitude is not incidental to the character. She has structured her entire existence around the avoidance of company, and over the course of the film, we learn exactly why: her only child died decades earlier, and she has spent the intervening years wondering whether she bears responsibility for his death. Field makes this grief feel distinctive and lived-in rather than generic, the specific weight of a woman who has learned to carry sorrow so long that it has simply become part of how she moves through the world.
Marcellus the octopus, meanwhile, sees straight through her. This is where the film’s most unusual creative choice pays off completely: by giving the audience direct access to the octopus’s internal monologue, voiced by Alfred Molina with a world-weary intelligence that never tips into cutesiness, the film establishes an omniscient perspective on Tova’s pain that she herself cannot fully articulate. Marcellus does not merely observe humans. He judges them, with the particular contempt of a being who considers himself “subservient to a species beneath me in every observable metric,” and yet he cannot help caring about the specific human who cleans his tank with genuine tenderness each night. The tension between his stated disdain and his obvious affection is the film’s most amusing running joke and its most emotionally sincere throughline simultaneously.
The arrival of Lewis Pullman’s Cameron – a young drifter who rolls into town in a broken-down minivan, ostensibly collecting a debt, and ends up filling in for the injured Tova at the aquarium – gives the film its central relationship. Tova and Cameron develop a bond with the patience the film affords it – not rushed toward resolution, but allowed to accumulate through small shared tasks and silences, the mundane choreography of mopping floors and polishing glass becoming, gradually, something closer to genuine companionship between two people who have each, in their own ways, given up on being fully known by anyone.
Marcellus, watching all of this from his tank and occasionally escaping it for unauthorized adventures around the aquarium, becomes convinced that Tova and Cameron possess the power to heal each other – and, in the film’s most charming conceit, he sets about engineering that healing with the meddling enthusiasm of a busybody who happens to have eight arms and access to places humans cannot easily reach. Watching Marcellus move through his tank is genuinely mesmerizing, and Molina’s voiceover is so thoroughly convincing that you almost immediately find yourself accepting Marcellus’s interiority as simply true within the world of the film.
Colm Meaney, as the general store proprietor Ethan, provides the film’s dose of small-town texture without overplaying the role’s obvious charms, and the supporting cast around Tova and Cameron generally understand the register the film is working in: warm without being saccharine, and sentimental without losing sight of genuine loss underneath the sentiment.
Remarkably Bright Creatures does not announce its ambitions loudly, nor does it reach for the kind of prestige-drama weightiness that often accompanies stories about grief and aging. But it trusts that an eight-armed philosopher with a chip on his shoulder about the human species can deliver as much emotional truth as any conventional human protagonist, and it tells its small, warm story with genuine craft and genuine feeling. Suffice to say, that Emmy was well-earned.