Have you seen the tenderhearted fantasy drama about a lonely cleaning lady at a government facility who forms an intense emotional bond with an intelligent aquatic creature confined to a tank and desperate to escape?
No, it’s not Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, but Remarkably Bright Creatures, a new feature adapted from the bestselling 2022 novel by Shelby Van Pelt. This time, the central relationship is platonic—and thankfully so, because the aquatic creature is a wise elderly octopus named Marcellus who narrates the action through Alfred Molina’s warm, reflective voice.
Director Olivia Newman (Where the Crawdads Sing), who co-wrote the script with John Whittington, aims for something gentle and traditionally heartwarming. And she largely succeeds. The film unfolds like solid family entertainment—a Hallmark-style story about people tending to old wounds in a small, picturesque town. But as often happens with such stories, the real question is not where the story goes, but what it quietly awakens in you as it unfolds.
Sally Field plays Tovah, a widow still shaped by the loss of her husband and teenage son, who died decades ago under circumstances the town has long since simplified into a single explanation. She is kind, steady, and stuck—living a life that continues, but does not quite move.
Change arrives in the form of Cameron, an unemployed musician searching for the father he never knew. Played with understated ease by Lewis Pullman, he carries his own unfinished story: a mother lost to addiction, a past that never quite settled into meaning. Watching him, you sense not just a character in motion, but someone trying—perhaps without knowing it—to rewrite the narrative he inherited.
Around them is a familiar but appealing ensemble: Kathy Baker, Joan Chen, and Beth Grant as Tovah’s loyal friends; Colm Meaney as the quietly devoted shopkeeper who has always been part of her life; and Sofia Black-D’Elia as Avery, whose charm and hidden pain briefly derail Cameron before sending him back, wiser, into his own unfolding. “She makes me wanna be on time,” he says—a line that captures, in a simple way, how another person can shift the direction of your story.
You can anticipate where the film is heading. Its narrative pieces are visible early on: loss seeking replacement, loneliness seeking connection, questions seeking resolution. And yet, even when you see the pattern, something else happens. You begin to recognize the patterns in your own life—the roles you’ve accepted, the stories you’ve stopped questioning.
The film doesn’t always trust its audience to sit with that recognition. Subtext is often explained rather than felt, as when Marcellus observes that while he longs to escape his tank, Tovah’s need for escape lies deeper. Music swells to reassure us that sadness is part of life’s design, rather than allowing silence to do its quieter, more powerful work.
And yet, the actors bring a grounded truth that cuts through the sweetness. Sally Field, in particular, delivers moments of such vulnerability that you feel something real breaking through the structure of the film. In those moments, the story stops being predictable and becomes personal. You’re no longer watching how the pieces will fit—you’re sensing what remains unresolved, both on screen and within yourself.
Marcellus, the narrating octopus, is an unusual device. It’s not entirely clear what the story gains from his perspective, and at times the logic stretches thin. But Molina’s voice and the convincing CGI make him feel surprisingly real—a quiet observer of human lives, noticing connections the characters themselves cannot yet see.
And perhaps that is his true function.
Not to explain the story, but to reflect it back.
Because when a story works—even one that is familiar, even one that over-explains—it does something subtle. It invites you to look at your own life not as a fixed sequence of events, but as something still open, still interpretable.
When the film escapes its more conventional tendencies, when it loosens its grip on neat resolutions, you find yourself leaning in. Not to see what happens next—you already know that—but to sense what else might be possible.
And that is where it becomes more than a pleasant film.
It becomes a small moment of recognition.
A reminder that even when a story feels settled, something underneath it may still be moving, waiting to be seen.