REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES (2026) Movie Review: Sally Field and a Giant Octopus Will Break Your Heart Open
- Joao Nsita
- 13 hours ago
- 11 min read
Opening Scene
Some films arrive in the world at exactly the moment you need them. Remarkably Bright Creatures, director Olivia Newman's luminous adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt's bestselling novel, is that kind of film. It stars Sally Field as Tova Sullivan, a solitary widow who cleans an aquarium at night and forms an unlikely bond with Marcellus — a giant Pacific octopus voiced with gentle authority by Alfred Molina — and Lewis Pullman as Cameron, the adrift young man whose path intersects with hers in ways that neither of them could have anticipated. Released on Netflix on May 8, 2026, it is a film about grief and connection, about the surprising places that love can find us, about the intelligence that exists in forms we rarely stop to notice. It is, against all expectations, one of the most moving films of the year — and one of the most quietly radical. Because what Remarkably Bright Creatures ultimately argues is that we are not alone in the way we fear we are. That something — some creatures, some people, some grace — is always paying attention. That the universe is stranger and kinder than it looks from inside our grief.
👉 If you love this, check out: Movie Review: Players (2024) — Does This Modern Rom-Com Score Big?
📚 Related Articles
Plot Summary
Tova Sullivan (Sally Field) is a woman built from grief. Her husband died not long ago. Her son Erik disappeared years before that — lost at sea under circumstances that were never fully resolved — and the wound of that loss has never healed. Tova moves through her life with a quiet efficiency that could be mistaken for acceptance: she cleans the aquarium at night, she maintains her routines, she is unfailingly kind to the people around her. But inside she is still waiting — for resolution, for meaning, for something to tell her that her son's life, and her love for him, meant something.
Into this carefully ordered life comes Marcellus (voiced by Alfred Molina), a giant Pacific octopus of considerable intelligence and — as we come to understand through the film's remarkable device of giving him a voice-over — considerable emotional acuity. Marcellus observes Tova with the attentiveness of someone who has nothing to do but pay attention. He notices things. He understands things. And he has, it emerges, a connection to her missing son that neither of them knows about yet.
Cameron (Lewis Pullman) arrives at the aquarium through a series of circumstances that are, on the surface, coincidental and, below the surface, the inevitable convergence of two people who need each other. Cameron is a young man unmoored — drifting from job to job, place to place, carrying a loss of his own that he has never fully faced. His connection to Tova deepens gradually, through shared work and shared silence and the strange intimacy that forms between people who are both, in their different ways, looking for the same thing.
The plot moves between Tova and Cameron and, magnificently, Marcellus — whose sections of voice-over provide both wit and a kind of cosmic perspective that the human characters can only approach obliquely. The resolution, when it comes, is earned with full emotional honesty: nothing is magically fixed, but something essential is found.
Supporting performances from Colm Meaney, Joan Chen, Kathy Baker, and Sofia Black-D'Elia add warmth and texture to the small-town world that surrounds Tova and Cameron.
Director's Style & Cinematic Elements
Olivia Newman, whose previous feature Where the Crawdads Sing (2022) demonstrated a lyrical approach to literary adaptation, brings to Remarkably Bright Creatures an even more assured visual intelligence. The aquarium setting is used brilliantly — its combination of dark corridors and luminous tanks creates a visual metaphor that runs throughout the film: the world is mostly darkness, but there are pockets of astonishing light, and you only find them if you're paying attention.
The decision of how to realise Marcellus is one the film handles with inspired restraint. He is a real octopus — beautifully rendered through a combination of puppetry and CGI that feels entirely believable — but it is Alfred Molina's voice that gives him his emotional presence. Molina pitches the performance perfectly: there is no whimsy, no Disney-ification, no winking at the audience. Marcellus speaks with the gravity and the warmth of someone who has observed human beings for a long time and has arrived at a complex mixture of exasperation and tenderness about the species.
Newman's pacing is patient without being slow. The film trusts its quieter moments — the long silences in the aquarium at night, the conversations between Tova and Cameron that are really about things neither of them can quite say — and those moments accumulate with a weight that makes the film's emotional payoffs feel genuinely earned rather than manufactured.
The screenplay by Newman and John Whittington is faithful to the novel's structure while making smart cinematic choices about what to show and what to imply.
Themes & Deeper Meaning
Remarkably Bright Creatures is, at its simplest, a film about grief. But grief is never simple, and the film knows it. What it actually explores, with remarkable sophistication for a mainstream Netflix drama, is the way grief can become a kind of identity — how we can become so structured around our losses that we stop leaving room for anything else.
Tova's grief for her son is the film's emotional centre. It is not a grief that asks for sympathy — Tova is too dignified for that, too self-contained. What it asks for is witness. And the film's central argument is that witness is available in the most unexpected places: in an octopus's unblinking attention, in a young stranger's uncomplicated need for connection, in the small routine kindnesses that are the human equivalent of Marcellus observing from his tank.
The film is also, more quietly, about intelligence — about the many forms it takes and the many forms we fail to recognise it in. Marcellus's intelligence is presented not as a charming conceit but as a serious fact: octopuses are among the most cognitively complex creatures on earth, and the film's insistence on taking that seriously is both scientifically respectful and thematically essential. If Marcellus can feel, can observe, can care — then what does that say about the invisible inner lives of all the creatures we pass through our days without noticing?
There is also a thread about absent fathers and searching children, about the stories we tell ourselves about why people leave and the stories we might have to revise. This thread gives the film its plot architecture while the grief gives it its soul.
👉 For more beautiful stories about love and connection: What To Read — Books, Films & Stories We Love
Acting Performances
Sally Field's performance in Remarkably Bright Creatures is the finest of her late career. Field has always been a supreme screen naturalist — there is never a moment when you catch her acting — and here she channels that naturalism into a character whose entire quality is the quality of restraint. Tova holds everything inside, and Field makes you feel everything she's holding. It is one of those performances that reveals itself gradually, deepening scene by scene, until you realise midway through the film that you are completely undone by someone who has barely raised their voice in ninety minutes.
Lewis Pullman has been quietly building one of the most impressive young careers in Hollywood, and his work here is career-best. Cameron is underwritten in the early scenes — intentionally so — and Pullman fills those early gaps with a physical presence and an emotional intelligence that make the character's development feel entirely credible. His scenes with Field have a genuineness that is very hard to manufacture and very easy to feel.
Alfred Molina's voice work as Marcellus is a quiet miracle. He gives the octopus gravitas, wit, and — unexpectedly — warmth.
"Humans are not built for patience. They are built for hope, which is patience dressed up in better clothes." — Marcellus, Remarkably Bright Creatures
Strengths
The greatest strength of Remarkably Bright Creatures is its emotional honesty. In a landscape full of manipulative drama that manufactures tears through cheap sentiment and narrative shortcuts, this film earns every feeling it asks you to have. It does not rush. It does not explain. It does not tell you how to feel. It builds, with loving patience, a world and a set of characters in which feeling becomes unavoidable — not because the film forces you into it but because you've been given enough time and enough truth to arrive there naturally.
The octopus conceit, which could so easily have been twee or whimsical, is handled with extraordinary seriousness. Marcellus is not comic relief. He is the film's spiritual intelligence — the figure who can see what the humans cannot because he is not trapped inside the human stories they tell themselves about their losses and their limitations.
Sally Field. The performance alone would justify the film's existence.
The film also benefits enormously from its small-town Pacific Northwest setting, which Newman renders with a textural richness that grounds the more overtly emotional material in something vivid and specific.
👉 Love character-driven drama? Explore our What To Watch picks
Areas for Improvement
Remarkably Bright Creatures is not a film without flaws. The film's first act is, by its own design, quite slow — establishing the world of the aquarium and Tova's solitary life with an unhurried thoroughness that rewards patience but may frustrate viewers seeking faster narrative engagement.
The supporting characters, while warmly played, occasionally feel more like functions in Tova and Cameron's stories than fully realised individuals in their own right. Colm Meaney's role, in particular, seems to gesture toward a more developed arc than the film has time to deliver.
Some viewers may find the film's emotional register too consistently melancholy in its first half — it earns its warmth, but it takes time, and those not attuned to that rhythm may disengage before the film reveals its full range.
The CGI elements of Marcellus are occasionally — very occasionally — visibly artificial. It is a minor observation against a generally excellent visual realisation, but it is worth noting.
Comparative Analysis
Remarkably Bright Creatures exists in the lineage of a specific kind of American literary drama: quiet, character-centred, coastal, and emotionally serious. Its closest relatives include Where the Crawdads Sing (Newman's own previous film), Steel Magnolias (1989, which also starred Sally Field and which shares the later film's attention to female grief and female community), and A Man Called Otto (2022), which similarly used an unlikely friendship to crack open a character's armoured grief.
It also deserves mention alongside the finest recent examples of the "magical realist drama" subgenre — films that introduce one extraordinary element into an otherwise naturalistic world and use that element to illuminate emotional truths that realism alone cannot reach. The Shape of Water (2017) and Arrival (2016) both operate by similar logic, though at very different scales.
Target Audience
Remarkably Bright Creatures will resonate most deeply with viewers who have experienced significant loss and who are not looking for a film that will tidy that loss away. It is a film for people who need something to sit with them in the dark, who need to be told — gently, through story — that their grief makes sense and that life, bewilderingly and stubbornly, continues to offer things worth receiving.
It will appeal strongly to readers of the novel, of course, and to fans of literary drama more broadly. Older viewers and those who responded to Sally Field's previous work will find this film particularly rewarding. It is also, despite its emotional weight, a film that parents and adult children might watch together with particular benefit.
Octopus enthusiasts will be delighted. But they already know that.
Personal Impact
I watched Remarkably Bright Creatures alone, late at night, and I was not prepared for what it did to me. I knew it was about grief. I knew it was about an octopus. I did not know it would find, with such quiet precision, the exact shape of something I carry — the particular loneliness of missing someone you cannot explain to people who didn't know them.
The moment that broke me was not the one I expected. It was a small moment — Tova, alone in the aquarium, speaking quietly to Marcellus about her son — in which Sally Field does nothing more than stand still and look at a tank of water. And somehow, in that stillness, I felt all of it. The love and the loss and the absurdity of speaking to an octopus because the person you actually want to speak to is gone.
That is what great film does. It finds the precise location of your private grief and holds a light up to it, not to expose you but to let you see it clearly — to let you know that someone else has been there too.
Conclusion
Remarkably Bright Creatures is one of the most emotionally generous films Netflix has produced: beautifully made, brilliantly acted, and deeply, unsentimentally human. Sally Field delivers what may be the performance of her career. Lewis Pullman confirms his status as one of the finest young actors in Hollywood. Alfred Molina gives an octopus a soul.
Available on Netflix globally from May 8, 2026. Watch it when you have the space to feel something. Then call someone you love.
💖 If you enjoyed this review, consider supporting That Love Podcast: https://www.thatlovepodcast.com/thewriter
📚 Related Articles
🎬 You Might Also Like
❓ FAQs: Remarkably Bright Creatures (2026)
1. Is Remarkably Bright Creatures worth watching? Absolutely. It is one of the most emotionally honest and beautifully crafted films on Netflix in 2026. If you are prepared for a quiet, moving drama, it is an essential watch.
2. Where can I watch Remarkably Bright Creatures? The film is streaming exclusively on Netflix from May 8, 2026.
3. Is Remarkably Bright Creatures based on a true story? No, but it is based on Shelby Van Pelt's bestselling debut novel of the same name, published in 2022. The novel's themes are emotionally autobiographical in the way the best fiction often is.
4. Does Remarkably Bright Creatures have a happy ending? It has an ending of earned, honest warmth — neither falsely uplifting nor simply sad. It will make you cry, but the right kind of tears.
5. Who voices the octopus in Remarkably Bright Creatures? Alfred Molina voices Marcellus the octopus.
6. How long is Remarkably Bright Creatures? Approximately 111 minutes.
7. Is the book or the movie better? This is always a subjective question, but Olivia Newman's adaptation is faithful to the spirit of the novel while making excellent cinematic choices. Readers of the novel will find much to love in the film.
8. What is the Rotten Tomatoes score for Remarkably Bright Creatures? Critical scores were not yet available at time of writing (the film releases May 8, 2026), but early audience responses have been enthusiastic.
9. Who directed Remarkably Bright Creatures? Olivia Newman, who previously directed Where the Crawdads Sing (2022) for Netflix.
10. Is Remarkably Bright Creatures appropriate for children? The film deals with themes of grief, loss, and emotional complexity that are better suited to older viewers (12+). There is no inappropriate content, but younger children may find it emotionally heavy.
About the Director: Olivia Newman
Olivia Newman is an American film director whose career spans independent cinema and prestige studio work. She gained significant attention with First Match (2018) and Where the Crawdads Sing (2022). Newman brings to Remarkably Bright Creatures a sensitivity for small-scale human drama and a poet's eye for natural environments. Her ability to coax performances of great emotional depth from her actors — particularly evident in her work with Sally Field — marks her as one of the most quietly essential directors working in contemporary Hollywood.
💖 If you'd like to support That Love Podcast, donate here: https://www.thatlovepodcast.com/donate
.jpg)
