Remarkably Bright Creatures review: Warm, wistful and quietly moving

There is something inherently risky about adapting a book in which the wisest, funniest, and most emotionally perceptive character is an octopus, especially when that octopus has already developed a cult following among readers who spent an entire novel quietly falling in love with his observations about grief, loneliness, and humans behaving strangely near aquariums.

Netflix’s Remarkably Bright Creatures, based on Shelby Van Pelt’s bestselling 2022 novel, understands the emotional appeal of the source material, but not always its narrative magic. Director Olivia Newman’s adaptation is warm, tender and intermittently moving, yet it sands down some of the novel’s strangest and most distinctive edges in favour of a safer, more conventional family drama.

At the centre of the story is Tova Sullivan (Sally Field), a grieving widow working night shifts at an aquarium in a sleepy Pacific Northwest town. Still carrying the weight of her son Erik’s disappearance decades earlier, Tova has settled into a life built around routine, silence, and carefully managed distance. Her only unexpected companion is Marcellus, a remarkably intelligent giant Pacific octopus voiced by Alfred Molina, who watches humans with equal parts fascination and exhaustion. Into this carefully lonely world arrives Cameron (Lewis Pullman), a drifting young man trying to untangle his own fractured family history. Naturally, secrets begin connecting everyone in increasingly emotional ways.

The film works best when it slows down enough to simply observe people existing with grief rather than dramatically announcing it. Sally Field brings extraordinary gentleness to Tova. She does not play her as a woman crushed by tragedy, but as someone who has quietly reorganised her entire personality around loss. It is a deeply restrained performance filled with tiny pauses, withheld emotions, and exhausted kindness. Field understands that loneliness often looks perfectly functional from the outside.

Lewis Pullman complements her well with a performance that feels scruffier and emotionally restless. Cameron could have easily become the film’s most irritating ingredient as the wandering man-child with unresolved parental issues. But Pullman gives him enough awkward sincerity to make him believable.

And then there is Marcellus. Or rather, the frustrating lack of enough Marcellus.

In Shelby Van Pelt’s novel, the octopus is not a side attraction or whimsical emotional support animal. He is the protagonist. The book unfolds significantly through his perspective, allowing readers into the deeply funny, melancholic and surprisingly philosophical inner world of a creature who understands humans better than humans understand themselves. His narration gives the novel its soul. He is observant, judgemental, lonely, witty and oddly profound. The film, however, reduces him to something closer to a narrative device.

Alfred Molina’s voice work is excellent. It is warm, weary, and gently sardonic but the screenplay sidelines Marcellus far too often. Instead of driving the emotional rhythm of the story, he becomes an occasional commentator appearing between stretches of very human melodrama. One almost senses the adaptation growing nervous about fully embracing the octopus perspective, as though it feared audiences would not emotionally invest in a cephalopod philosopher. Ironically, that exact eccentricity is what made the book memorable in the first place. Even Bill Gates agrees!

Still, Newman deserves credit for resisting the temptation to turn the film into pure saccharine. Remarkably Bright Creatures occasionally flirts with Hallmark territory, but Field’s grounded performance keeps it emotionally anchored. The aquarium setting also helps enormously. The soft blue lighting, quiet corridors and underwater imagery create a calming melancholy that beautifully suits the story’s themes of memory and isolation.

Where the film falters is in its tendency to over-explain emotional beats that the book trusted readers to simply feel. Several revelations arrive with the predictability of a streaming-era comfort drama, and the mystery elements lack urgency. The pacing becomes uneven in the middle stretch as side characters drift in and out without leaving much impact. The book was quirky in deeply specific ways; the film is quirky in a more algorithm-friendly manner. You can almost sense the film was trying to package grief into something cosy and universally digestible.

And yet, despite its compromises, the film remains affecting because its emotional core is sincere. It understands that grief is not always loud. Sometimes it simply sits beside you quietly while you clean an aquarium at night.

Remarkably Bright Creatures may not fully capture the peculiar brilliance of Shelby Van Pelt’s novel, especially when it pushes its most fascinating character into the background. But thanks to Sally Field’s deeply humane performance and the film’s gentle intelligence, it still leaves behind a soft ache, much like Marcellus himself.