REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES Review

I am going to tell you something and I need you to stay with me. There is a film on Netflix right now in which a CGI octopus named Marcellus narrates the emotional healing journey of a grieving widow and I watched every single minute of it with my whole chest open like an idiot. Alfred Molina voices the octopus. He is wry. He is world weary. He has opinions. I respected him enormously.

The crying is entirely Sally Field's fault. She plays Tova, a woman who has lost her husband and her son and has quietly reorganised her entire existence around not falling apart, and Field does this thing where she is simulataneously frazzled and heartbreaking and completely real that I find almost unfair. She talks to the octopus every night because he listens without judgement and does not try to set her up with anyone from the knitting circle. I understood this completely.

Lewis Pullman shows up as Cameron, a perpetually down on his luck drifter looking for a father he has never met, and he and Field have this warm, unshowy, completely lived in chemistry that the film is smart enough to treat as its entire reason for existing. No big speeches. No manufactured moments. Just two people who needed each other before they knew it, finding their way there slowly and honestly.

What actually impressed me is how well this adaptation was put together. Olivia Newman has made real choices here, trimming the novel down to its best parts with enough confidence to know what the film needed to be rather than just faithfully reproducing what the book was. The editing moves. The reveals land. The sense of place, the aquarium, Tova's house, the grey Pacific Northwest light, feels genuinely inhabited rather than decoratively assembled.

Is Remarkably Bright Creatures a film about an octopus helping a grieving widow heal? Yes. Did that octopus make me feel things I was not prepared for? Also yes. Some films just reach out and get you, tentacles and all.

🍿 SCORE = 74/100