Dogs have had a real monopoly when it comes to narrating their own treacly tales of human-animal bonding – Kevin Costner voiced one in The Art of Racing in the Rain (2019), as did Josh Gad in A Dog’s Purpose (2017). No more! Now is the time for the humble octopus. And Netflix’s Remarkably Bright Creatures proves they can be just as quaint and sentimental as their four-legged competitors.
The film is adapted by director Olivia Newman, alongside writer John Whittington, from Shelby Van Pelt’s stealth 2022 bestseller of the same name. It sold 1.4 million copies largely on the word-of-mouth promise that it was a reliable comfort read – with a little help from the popularity of the Oscar-winning documentaryMy Octopus Teacher (2020). Remarkably Bright Creatures, then, takes no risks, cranking up Dickon Hinchliffe’s score like CPR for its own sense of whimsy.
Our narrator is Alfred Molina in gentle crank mode as Marcellus, a highly intelligent octopus (we know this because he uses phrases like “to be at their mercy is humbling”) kept in captivity in the quaint Pacific Northwest enclave of Sowell Bay. It’s the kind of place where every resident is a harmless eccentric with a permanent, service-job smile – a prime target for some great, subversive, Lynchian evil if this film were that way inclined. The convenience-store owner (Colm Meaney) is a former “Deadhead”, a Grateful Dead super fan. The local millennial (Sofia Black-D'Elia) – there’s only one, it seems – traded in her dreams to open a paddleboard business. The older women (among them Kathy Baker and Twin Peaks’s Joan Chen) meet each week to knit, but really to gossip.
The most harmless of the eccentrics is Tova (Sally Field), the aquarium’s night cleaner, who one night saves Marcellus’s life, leading the pair to (literally) join hands and become fast cross-species friends. While Marcellus, an ageing octopus feeling stifled in his imprisonment, is meant to act as a spiritual mirror to Tova, the film ultimately isn’t all that interested in the more delicate work of making peace with what can’t be brought back.
Instead, an outsider, Lewis Pullman’s Cameron, a struggling musician living out of his dead mother’s camper van, rocks up in search of his father. He and Tova play out the usual intergenerational dynamic. She’s meek and fussy. He’s never worked a proper job in his life. She teaches him how to chip gum off the floor. They help each other land romantic dates. Field and Pullman try to out-earnest each other.
Marcellus, wise as he is, has quickly figured out that Tova has “a hole” in her heart that Cameron might help to fill. But really all he can do is smack his suckers on the glass and lament to us about how poorly developed humanity’s communication skills are, all before he recognises the film’s grand solution – one that will become screamingly obvious to the audience before the three-quarter mark has even passed. It leads to his one and only meaningful interference in the narrative.
Mostly, Tova and Cameron use Marcellus as the non-consenting recipient of all their trauma-dumping. In fact, the poor creature is happily disappeared from the narrative for a good chunk of the film’s runtime, and no one really seems to miss him. It must be quite the affront to be sidelined in your own story like this. I bet the octopus population is furious about it.
Dir: Olivia Newman. Starring: Sally Field, Lewis Pullman, Joan Chen, Kathy Baker, Beth Grant, Sofia Black-D'Elia, Colm Meaney, Alfred Molina. Cert 12, 113 minutes.
‘Remarkably Bright Creatures’ is streaming on Netflix
