Sally Field’s New Netflix Film Has a Remarkable Origin Story

Four days before preproduction was set to begin on Remarkably Bright Creatures, director Olivia Newman had no house, no spatula, and no pot holders. She had a bottle of WhistlePig whiskey, a board game, some pajamas, and a film to make.

It was January 2025 in Vancouver, and Newman — best known for adapting another beloved novel, Where the Crawdads Sing — had just arrived on set with her jazz-musician husband Steve Lehman and their two children. They were fresh victims of the Eaton fire, which had destroyed their Southern California home and everything in it. Netflix moved the family to Canada two days after the loss. The film’s unit production manager quietly outfitted them with winter clothes. Their Altadena house — the one she and Lehman had bought in 2021, the one that finally made two East Coasters admit that Los Angeles had become home — was gone.

And so Newman went to work.

A Story About Loss That Became Personal in Ways No One Expected

The film, which debuts on Netflix this Friday, centers on Tova Sullivan, played by Sally Field — a haunted widow working the night shift as a cleaning woman at a Pacific Northwest aquarium. Tova has spent decades in the fictional coastal town of Sowell Bay, Washington, carrying two enormous losses: her husband’s recent death and, some 30 years earlier, the disappearance of her teenage son in a boating accident. She’s become closed off, confiding more to Marcellus, the aquarium’s aging octopus (voiced by Alfred Molina), than to any of the humans in her life. Then Cameron, a wayward young man played by Lewis Pullman, rolls into town in a beat-up microbus, looking for the father he never knew — and the two wounded souls, separated by a generation, slowly find each other.

Newman signed onto the project in 2024 because she wanted to make a movie about older women who are overlooked, forgotten, left behind by a culture that has little patience for aging. She was thinking of the 70- and 80-year-olds in her own life. She was not expecting to become the story.

“It was therapeutic to be grappling with this topic on film while I was grappling with the same thing personally,” Newman said, walking through her old Altadena neighborhood in April. “I’ve never experienced loss like this. It has been a different kind of grief.”

Location scouting — normally just an exhausting logistical exercise — became something else entirely. Touring a dozen waterfront properties to find the right home for Tova, Newman kept getting stopped by the ordinary objects inside other people’s houses. A pot holder. A spatula. The kind of things you don’t think about until they’re gone.

“I used to have a spatula. I used to have a closet full of junk,” she recalled. “Going into other people’s houses is very triggering. You’ll see a pot holder, and you’ll be like, ‘Oh, my God, I just replaced our pot holders, and I loved them.’ It’s silly but it’s a constant visual reminder.”

She kept going anyway. Producer Bryan Unkeless, who brought the project to Newman, was struck by that. “What is so great about this book is it inspires you to have the courage to go find community and to find people to rely on and to love,” he said. “Olivia immediately went to that head space. She could have easily said, ‘Listen, I need a month to get my life in order and figure stuff out.’ But she didn’t. Her first instinct was ‘Let’s go.’”

Newman remembers the day after the fire, on the phone with her manager: “I cannot lose this job.” Her husband handled the insurance, the logistics, getting the kids back to school. She handled making a living. “That really helped us bring down the anxiety,” she said.

Sally Field and the Weight of a Shared Disaster

Field, who lives in Pacific Palisades some 50 miles from Altadena, was also touched by the fires — in a different, haunting way. Her house survived. The ones surrounding it did not.

“My house still remained. The two houses to the left of me, the two houses to the right of me, the three houses in front of me and dotted all the way down this little knoll that I live on — gone,” Field said. “The disaster of it is just not to be conceived.”

“Both Livi and I were gobsmacked,” she added. “Newman had nothing, and I had just this disaster area. Boy, oh, boy, this is a test of the human spirit.”

That shared experience created a bond between director and star that you can feel on screen. Watching Field play Tova’s grief — a woman contemplating leaving the only life she’s ever known — Newman often couldn’t hold it together behind the camera.

“I could feel how lost she was. It was how I was feeling at the same time,” Newman said. Field “would just make me weep at the camera. And I don’t know if that’s because of what I was going through or just because Sally is so good, but there were times where I couldn’t even call cut because I was too wrecked.”

Field, for her part, brought her own fire to the role — and not just because of the wildfires. She’s been vocal about what it means to find material worthy of her at this stage of her career.

“It’s very rare to find something about older women that isn’t somehow demoralizing,” Field said. “I am proud to be almost 80. I don’t feel what sometimes this culture is asking me to feel, which is shame.”

What Critics Are Saying

Reviews landing ahead of the film’s debut are warm, if not unanimous in their enthusiasm. The consensus seems to be: don’t fight it.

The Wrap called it “too heartwarming to dismiss,” praising the film’s craftsmanship — particularly its commitment to the overcast, grey-toned Pacific Northwest setting — and Field’s performance above all. “In lesser hands, Tova is just a sad lady helped by an octopus, but Field is so good you immediately accept that a CGI mollusk is her pal.” The review also noted the film’s smart Mother’s Day timing, comparing it favorably to last year’s Netflix hit Nonnas as part of a winning strategy of centering older female talent.

The Saturday Evening Post gave it four stars, calling it “uncommonly heartfelt” and singling out Molina’s voice work as proof that “the most effective movie voice work isn’t always in a Pixar cartoon.” The CGI octopus itself earned particular praise — “a wonder to behold” — though reviewers across the board noted that Marcellus has a habit of disappearing from the narrative for stretches longer than the story can really afford.

That’s also the crux of Looper’s more skeptical take, which argued the film struggles to keep its octopus central to the drama when he’s confined to a tank — and that the human leads would have found each other with or without him. Still, even that review acknowledged the filmmakers’ self-awareness, pointing to the casting of Molina — Doc Ock himself from the Spider-Man films — as a winking admission that the whole premise is a little absurd, “even if they choose to dramatize everything with the utmost sincerity.”

Colm Meaney, Joan Chen, Kathy Baker, Beth Grant, and Sofia Black-D’Elia round out a supporting cast that helps build the small-town community at the film’s heart — because ultimately, the movie is less about an octopus and more about what happens when people stop pretending they don’t need each other.

Newman is currently in the permitting stages of rebuilding her Altadena home. On a walk through the neighborhood in April, she passed the local hardware store she used to love so much she’d invent house projects just to have an excuse to shop there. Around the corner, Bar Betsy — a coffee and wine bar that’s part of a local institution — was opening its doors for the very first time since the fires.

“Oh my God, I’m so happy we walked by this today,” she said.

Her town is coming back. Her movie is here. And somewhere in a Vancouver aquarium set, a CGI octopus with three hearts saw all of it coming.