What does it mean to be kept? Remarkably Bright Creatures, Olivia Newman’s Netflix adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt’s 2022 bestseller, opens that question quietly, through the perceptive eyes of Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living out his days in a small-town aquarium on the Pacific Northwest coast. Voiced with imperious gravity by Alfred Molina, Marcellus narrates his captivity with the resigned intelligence of a philosopher who has read every available human and found the species wanting. He is the film’s strange conscience, an eight-armed observer cataloguing the grief and inertia pressing against his tank.
Beside him, Sally Field plays Tova Sullivan, a widow in her seventies cleaning the aquarium by night, keeping darkness at arm’s length through ritual and routine. Lewis Pullman rounds out the central trio as Cameron, a rootless young man whose camper van breaks down in town at an opportune moment. Newman’s film is sentimental by design, and self-aware enough about it to be almost charming. The machinery of fate creaks loudly throughout. But the performances carry a weight the plot, with its engineered coincidences, cannot always earn on its own.
The Weight Sally Field Carries
Field has always known how to locate the specific gravity of a character. Here, she plays Tova with compressed sorrow that only occasionally finds release. The woman is prickly in the way people become prickly when grief has calcified around them for too long. She bristles at town gossip, flinches at the word “suicide” applied to her son, and finds her most honest hours in the company of a creature who cannot, technically, judge her.
This is Field’s most substantial leading role in years, and she inhabits Tova without sentiment’s easy shortcuts. The character’s eccentricities feel earned rather than imposed. There is a scene where she lectures Cameron on the correct way to mop a floor, and Field plays it with a ferocity that reads less as comedy and more as a woman trying to impose order on a world that has repeatedly refused it.
Pullman matches her well. His Cameron is laconic where she is exacting, drifting where she is anchored, and their scenes together have a texture the script sometimes fails to earn through dialogue alone. He listens before he speaks, and the camera catches that restraint as something lived-in. Molina’s Marcellus operates at a remove, his voice carrying the world-weariness of something ancient and disenchanted. “I am subservient to a species beneath me in every observable metric,” he says, and Molina delivers it with the kind of resigned precision that makes you wish the line had been given more space to breathe.
Fate’s Architecture, Grief’s Resistance
Newman and co-screenwriter John Whittington have constructed the film around converging secrets that, by the final act, click into place with the satisfying and slightly suspicious tidiness of a jigsaw completed in one sitting. The connections between Tova and Cameron are telegraphed early, and the script spends considerable time not asking questions any real person in a small town would have asked immediately. This is the film’s most significant structural weakness: it needs its characters to remain incurious so that its revelations can arrive on schedule.
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The themes underneath the machinery are worth sitting with. The film is preoccupied with captivity in all its forms. Marcellus in his tank. Tova in her grief. Cameron in a life shaped by absences he never chose. There is something quietly existential in the image of Marcellus repeatedly escaping his enclosure, not to flee permanently, but to move through darkness and return. This becomes a kind of moral geometry for the film: freedom is less about escape and more about the capacity to keep moving through what confines you.
Newman’s direction is warm without being saccharine, though the film tips toward sentiment in its final act in ways that invite both eye-rolls and involuntary tears simultaneously. The parallel between Marcellus and Tova, both aging, both awaiting change, both tethered to a place they can no longer leave the same way they arrived, is drawn a little too neatly. What remains is cleaner, blunter, and occasionally more affecting for it.
What the CGI Gives and Takes Away
Marcellus is a composite of CGI and practical puppetry, and the technical work bringing him to life is genuinely impressive. His skin shifts color and texture with biological plausibility. His movements through water have a balletic, unhurried quality that makes the quieter aquarium sequences feel almost meditative. When Marcellus escapes his tank, slipping through corridors in the dark, the film briefly becomes something stranger and more alive than its domestic drama framework allows.
Giving him a voice, however, creates an epistemological puzzle the film never fully resolves. The audience hears his thoughts; the characters cannot. This positions Marcellus as a god of sorts, omniscient and ineffective, watching human suffering with an intelligence that can only express itself through plot manipulation. The logic of it occasionally strains on screen in ways that Van Pelt’s written whimsy absorbed more gracefully.
Newman’s wisest directorial choice is using Marcellus sparingly. The film is more confident in its human ensemble, and the Pacific Northwest setting, all grey water and cedar-light mornings, gives the story a visual melancholy suited to its emotional register. Cinematographer Mark Schwartzbard frames the aquarium as a place between worlds, lit from below, where the ordinary and the strange coexist without comment. The film looks like a memory of somewhere you have never been.
Remarkably Bright Creatures is a heartfelt mystery drama that premiered on Netflix on May 8, 2026. Based on the beloved novel by Shelby Van Pelt, the film follows Tova Sullivan, a stoic widow who finds solace in her night job cleaning the Sowell Bay Aquarium. Her life takes an extraordinary turn when she forms an unlikely bond with Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus with a curmudgeonly wit and a hidden talent for solving mysteries. As of today, the film is available to stream exclusively on Netflix, offering a poignant look at grief, friendship, and the surprising connections that help us heal.
Where to Watch Remarkably Bright Creatures (2026) Online
Full Credits
Title: Remarkably Bright Creatures
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: May 8, 2026
Rating: PG-13
Running time: 111 minutes
Director: Olivia Newman
Writers: Olivia Newman, John Whittington, Shelby Van Pelt (novel)
Producers and Executive Producers: Bryan Unkeless, Peter Craig, David Levine, Olivia Newman, Shelby Van Pelt, Erika Hampson, Alisa Tager, Tony Lipp, Alyssa Rodrigues
Cast: Sally Field, Lewis Pullman, Alfred Molina, Colm Meaney, Joan Chen, Kathy Baker, Beth Grant, Sofia Black-D’Elia, Laura Harris
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Ashley Connor
Editors: Tamara Meem
Composer: Dickon Hinchliffe
The Review
Remarkably Bright Creatures
Remarkably Bright Creatures earns its sentiment through two central performances of genuine warmth and restraint. The plot engineering is visible, the coincidences are many, and Marcellus works better as symbol than narrator. Field and Pullman make the grief feel real, and the film's quieter moments carry emotional weight that its more contrived ones cannot diminish.
PROS
- Sally Field delivers one of her finest recent performances, precise and deeply felt
- Field and Pullman share natural, lived-in chemistry that grounds the film's sentiment
- Stunning Pacific Northwest cinematography with genuine visual melancholy
- Marcellus' CGI is technically impressive and physically convincing
- The film's themes of captivity and grief carry quiet existential resonance
CONS
- The plot relies on characters avoiding obvious questions purely for dramatic convenience
- Strong supporting players (Joan Chen, Kathy Baker) are largely wasted in thin roles
- Marcellus works better as symbol than narrator; the omniscient voice strains on screen
- The final act tips heavily into engineered sentimentality
- Cameron's romance subplot contributes almost nothing to the film's emotional core
