Remarkably Bright Creatures

Before reading Shelby Van Pelt’s glorious 2022 book, Remarkably Bright Creatures, I had zero interest in the octopus. It just goes to show how reading can awaken curiosity about any topic, because I was just a little bit in the book—my number one book for 2022—when I began googling the eight-tentacled creatures late into the night. An octopus fan was born.

But would the Netflix movie, starring Sally Field and Lewis Pullman, match up to the warmth and humor and insights nestled in the book? I was hopeful, and my hopes were mostly realized.

Obviously, the book is almost always better than the screen adaptation. And that is true here as well. A book can develop characters much better than a movie.

However, director Olivia Newman had a secret weapon on her hands with Sally Field. Even acting with an octopus, Field delivers a performance full of grief and grace.

Field portrays Tova, an older woman headed quickly for elderly status. Brusque and no-nonsense, Tova has a few friends in her Pacific Northwest community, but she manages to keep most people at arm’s length. When we meet her, Tova is wrestling with a decision to sell her cozy log cabin and move into an assisted living facility. She grapples with this and her grief over losing her teenage son many years before in a drowning accident. By night she engages with vigor in her job: cleaning the local aquarium.

Her favorite creature is Marcellus, a red brick-hued octopus who has a penchant for escaping his confines. Voiced by Alfred Molina, Marcellus is full of himself, to be sure, but also grieving his loss of habitat at the bottom of the sea. His once peaceful life has been upended by capture (though in the human’s eyes it was really a rescue) and he longs for the quiet and beauty of his ocean floor home.

Together, these two creatures spend their nights together, communing on a level that lends magic to the book and the movie. Tova tells Marcellus all her woes, and he listens, grudgingly admitting to himself that she, though an inferior human, is quite his favorite of the species.

When a slip-and-fall accident renders Tova out of commission for a while, a new human enters the scene: Lewis Pullman’s Cameron, a scattered musician who lives in a decrepit van and has rolled into town looking for a big payout from a mysterious source. In the meantime, he finds work as Tova’s substitute cleaner, where he is subjected to her finicky and detailed oversight.

As this motherless son and sonless mother get to know each other, Marcellus observes them even as they watch him (and in a couple of cases, chase him down and plop him back into the tank).

As Marcellus and Tova continue to age and tussle with the decisions aging brings, the aimless Cameron searches for his roots and solid ground on which to stand. A plot twist causes each of them to reckon with their choices, now and the rest of their lives.

Christian viewers will recognize themes of grace and mercy, even as they might long for these characters to avail themselves of God’s generous wisdom in all things. He is with us as we age and grieve and search for our identities.

They will marvel at God’s creation of image bearers and cephalopods alike. Why did he make octopuses so remarkably bright? That’s definitely a question for Heaven. In the meantime, I’m off to Google it.

(Netflix, rated PG-13 for brief instances of strong language and mature themes)