• Alfred Molina confirmed in a new Variety interview that he would return as Doc Ock — “I would do it again”
• He revealed details about an original three-movie deal for the role that fans didn’t know about
• Molina currently stars in two Netflix projects: The Boroughs and Remarkably Bright Creatures
• His Doctor Octopus appeared in Spider-Man: No Way Home alongside his original Spider-Man 2 run
• Whether Marvel/Sony will actually call is a separate question

Alfred Molina is not closing any doors.

In a new interview with Variety, the actor confirmed what fans have long hoped: he’d be happy to return as Otto “Doc Ock” Octavius in another Spider-Man film. “I would do it again,” he told the outlet, adding that the conversation about coming back has never really gone away.

More surprising was what he revealed about his original deal: Molina disclosed there was a three-movie arrangement attached to the Doc Ock role from the beginning — a detail that reframes everything fans thought they knew about why the character returned so seamlessly in Spider-Man: No Way Home. The contractual groundwork, it seems, was laid back in the Sam Raimi era.

The Character’s Legacy

Molina’s Doc Ock in 2004’s Spider-Man 2 is still widely considered one of the best superhero film villains ever put on screen — tragic, intelligent, genuinely threatening. His return in No Way Home gave fans the reunion moment they’d been waiting for, and by most accounts, he delivered again.

Den of Geek argues he could return but perhaps shouldn’t — the concern being that over-revisiting legacy characters risks diluting what made them special in the first place. It’s a reasonable counterpoint. But Molina’s own enthusiasm, combined with the original deal structure he described, suggests this isn’t just wishful thinking from fan corners of the internet.

What He’s Up to Now

While the Marvel/Sony machinery decides what it wants to do, Molina has been busy. He’s currently on Netflix in The Boroughs, playing a retiree battling aliens, and in Remarkably Bright Creatures, voicing a giant Pacific octopus — which is either a coincidence or a very deliberate piece of casting symmetry.

Doc Ock or not, the man is not sitting still.

The post Alfred Molina Says He’d Play Doc Ock Again — and There’s Already Been a Conversation appeared first on Cream.

• The Boroughs premieres May 21 on Netflix, with all eight episodes dropping at once.
• The Duffer Brothers exec-produce; creators Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews wrote and showrun the series.
• Alfred Molina leads a stacked cast including Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, Clarke Peters, Denis O’Hare, and Bill Pullman.
• Critics are largely enthusiastic, praising the performances and the show’s sharp commentary on aging and ageism.
• The series has been widely described as “Stranger Things with grandparents” — but most reviewers say it earns that comparison rather than just coasting on it.

Netflix’s The Boroughs opens with a scene that tells you exactly what kind of show you’re in for. Genre legend Dee Wallace — best known as Elliot’s mom in E.T. — goes through her quiet nightly routine at an upscale desert retirement community, and then something with too many legs comes for her. Before you’ve even settled in, the tone is set: this is warm, funny, frightening, and smarter than it has any right to be.

The series, which drops all eight episodes on Thursday, is executive produced by Matt and Ross Duffer — the Stranger Things creators — but written and showrun by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, the Emmy-winning duo behind The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. The Spielberg comparisons are unavoidable and entirely intentional — this is a love letter to Amblin sci-fi, Stephen King, and the kind of genre storytelling that makes you feel something while something horrible is eating people. The twist is that instead of a gang of kids on bikes, the heroes are all in their 70s.

Alfred Molina plays Sam Cooper, a recently widowed aerospace engineer who moves into The Boroughs — a too-perfect, retro-futuristic retirement community in the New Mexico desert — because his late wife Lily (Jane Kaczmarek, luminous in flashbacks) had signed the contract before her death. Sam had no say in the matter. He despises the place on sight. He’s described by one critic as “Carl from Pixar’s Up come to life,” and that’s not far off: the grief is real, the rage is palpable, and Molina plays it with the kind of layered restraint that makes you feel every inch of his isolation.

“My wife’s dead,” Sam tells his neighbor Jack early on. “And the world just keeps on turning, and people just keep living their lives. They shop and they laugh and they eat. And they go to sleep, and they get up, and they do it all over again. And I hate ’em for it.” It’s a gut-punch of a line, and Molina delivers it like he means every word.

Sam doesn’t stay isolated for long. Bill Pullman‘s Jack — a gregarious, laid-back neighbor who’s keenly aware that single men are a rare commodity at The Boroughs — drags him to a welcome barbecue, and that’s where the ensemble assembles. Geena Davis plays Renee, a former music manager with a convertible and a go-get-’em energy that earns her the show’s best line: “The gray rebellion rises, such as it is.” Alfre Woodard is Judy, a retired journalist the show lovingly dubs a “chatty Nancy Drew.” The Wire‘s Clarke Peters plays her husband Art, a philosophical stoner who tends to hallucinogens in the desert and has a therapeutic relationship with a crow. And American Horror Story alum Denis O’Hare is Wally, a doctor who was on the front lines of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s, is now dying of stage-four prostate cancer, and somehow remains the funniest person in any room. His line about death — that it’s “the real monster. Everything else is shadows” — lands with the weight of someone who has earned the right to say it.

The welcome barbecue scene, directed by Ben Taylor in the premiere, is being called by Hollywood Reporter the single most delightful scene the show has to offer — the whole crew gossiping about neighbors, ribbing each other about their respective “body counts” (the sex kind, not the death kind), trading their gnarliest medical anecdotes. It’s a blast. And then later that same night, Sam is woken by strange noises and discovers a giant spider-legged monster with a taste for human fluids outside his house.

The Premise Is Familiar. The Cast Makes It Sing.

Nearly every critic has reached for the same shorthand — “Stranger Things with grandparents” — and it’s fair. The retirement community that’s too good to be true, the overlooked group of misfits who can see what others can’t, the institutional conspiracy hiding something monstrous: these are well-worn genre moves. The series even opens in the New Mexico desert without ever once uttering the word “Roswell,” which feels deliberately, cheekily restrained. The community itself, with its pastel homes, a hard-wired in-home communication device called Seraphim (think 2001‘s HAL, but cheerier), and management that talks to residents in a patronizing, childlike manner, has the cultish, Stepford quality of a place that has something to hide.

The show’s creators have said openly that they chose elderly heroes precisely because older people are dismissed and ignored in the same way children are — which makes them, counterintuitively, the perfect protagonists for this kind of story. The Boroughs community even has “The Manor,” a long-term care facility where residents who report seeing strange things tend to end up. Anyone who talks about creatures gets institutionalized. It’s a horror premise that doubles as a pretty pointed commentary on how society treats the elderly, and the show wears it lightly enough that it doesn’t feel like a lecture.

Each member of the gang brings a specific skill to the mission — Sam the engineer, Wally the doctor, Judy the journalist, Renee the connected former industry player — and the Avengers-style assembly is part of the fun. Ed Begley Jr. appears as Edward, an Alzheimer’s-suffering resident in The Manor whose ramblings about “a creature in the walls” turn out to be anything but delusional. Seth Numrich plays Blaine Shaw, the community’s CEO, whose face is as smooth as his manners and whose motives are exactly as sinister as they appear. Alice Kremelberg plays his wife Anneliese — and notably, Numrich and Kremelberg previously appeared together in The Sinner Season 4, a reunion that fans of that show will clock immediately.

The conspiracy involves secret tunnels, underground caves, mysterious thefts of anything containing quartz, mass bird deaths, a tree bearing glittering orange fruit, and creatures that leave shiny blue blood droplets when shot. The show keeps most of the graphic horror off-camera, which is the right call — the suggestion is more unsettling than the spectacle, and it keeps the tone from tipping into relentless darkness.

Composer John Paesano’s score draws on 1980s orchestral cinema — think the emotional sweep of early Spielberg — and multiple reviewers have singled it out as something worth seeking out on its own. The soundtrack choices are equally deliberate, with songs selected to reflect each character’s era, and Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” playing a significant role in Sam’s emotional arc.

Where Critics Land

The consensus is warm, with most reviewers landing between 4 and 4.5 out of 5. The performances are the runaway highlight everywhere you look. O’Hare in particular is getting attention across the board — his Wally provides genuine comedy without ever deflating the horror stakes. One review describes him preparing for a mission by packing a tote bag containing granola bars and a meat cleaver, and watching a YouTube tutorial to pick a lock at a funeral parlor. That’s the show in a nutshell.

Where critics diverge is on the mystery itself. Hollywood Reporter’s review is the most measured of the bunch, arguing that the show’s greatest flaw is spending too much time on the sci-fi plot at the expense of the ensemble chemistry that makes it special — that after the barbecue scene in episode one, the show scatters its characters to separate storylines before bringing them back together, and something is lost in the gap. The Boston Globe is similarly reserved, calling it “a copy of a copy” and suggesting the nostalgia is so layered — Spielberg evoking Stranger Things evoking Stranger Things evoking Spielberg again — that the show occasionally feels like it’s running on borrowed warmth.

But even the less enthusiastic reviews agree that the cast alone justifies the watch. Collider puts it well: “If Sam, Wally, Renee, Art, and Judy can remain perceptive, brave, and capable in a world that has already written them off, then aging itself becomes less frightening.”

The show is also lighter in tone than Stranger Things got by its final seasons, which works in its favor. It never pretends the stakes aren’t real, but it doesn’t wallow either. At its best — and it is frequently at its best — The Boroughs is the kind of show that makes you laugh, then makes you feel something ache, then puts a monster on screen before you’ve had time to recover.

The whole season is available to stream now on Netflix. The cast walked the red carpet at The Egyptian Theatre Hollywood on May 18 ahead of the premiere. All eight episodes drop Thursday, May 21.

“Death is the real monster,” Wally says. “Everything else is shadows.” With a cast this good bringing lines like that to life, the shadows are very much worth sitting with.

The post The Boroughs Review: Netflix’s Best New Sci-Fi Show appeared first on Cream.

• The Boroughs is now streaming on Netflix, all eight episodes dropping May 21.
• The show is executive produced by Stranger Things creators the Duffer Brothers, but created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews.
• Alfred Molina leads an all-star cast including Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, Bill Pullman, Clarke Peters, and Denis O’Hare.
• The series follows retirees at a New Mexico desert community who discover monsters are preying on their neighbors.
• Critics are largely won over by the cast and warmth, though some find the mystery formulaic and the pacing uneven.

The Duffer Brothers have spent the months since Stranger Things ended launching a steady stream of projects designed to fill the void — an animated spinoff, a wedding horror chiller, and now The Boroughs, their most ambitious swing yet at recapturing that lightning. And this time, they may have actually pulled it off.

The new Netflix sci-fi horror series, created and showrun by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews (the team behind The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance), is exactly what it sounds like and also so much more than that. Set in an idyllic, slightly eerie retirement community in the New Mexico desert — think mid-century modern architecture, pastel cul-de-sacs, and a CEO who never seems to age — it follows a group of retirees who discover something monstrous is stalking their neighbors in the night. The Duffers are executive producers, not writers or directors, but their fingerprints are all over the show’s Spielbergian warmth, its creature-feature thrills, and its deep love of a ragtag found family going up against forces they probably shouldn’t be fighting.

The difference is that where Stranger Things gave us kids on bicycles, The Boroughs gives us septuagenarians in golf carts. And against all odds, it works.

Meet the Gray Rebellion

Alfred Molina plays Sam Cooper, a recently widowed retired aerospace engineer from Chicago who arrives at The Boroughs furious and heartbroken. His late wife Lilly (Jane Kaczmarek, warm and vivid in flashbacks) was the one who wanted to move there. Her death didn’t void the contract, so Sam’s patient, loving daughter Claire (Jena Malone) deposits him at this sun-drenched desert compound against his will. He immediately tries to leave. The smooth-talking CEO Blaine Shaw (Seth Numrich), who runs the place with his glamorous wife Anneliese (Alice Kremelberg), will not be releasing anyone from their contract.

Molina is fantastic — a man whose grief has curdled into pure stubbornness, who resists every overture of friendship right up until he can’t anymore. The show’s most quietly devastating moment comes early, when Sam tells neighbor Jack (Bill Pullman, wonderfully laid-back and warm) exactly how it feels to lose someone: “My wife’s dead. And the world just keeps on turning, and people just keep living their lives. They shop and they laugh and they eat. And they go to sleep, and they get up, and they do it all over again. And I hate ’em for it.” It’s as clean and honest a distillation of grief as you’ll hear on television.

Jack coaxes Sam to a welcome barbecue, and that backyard scene — burgers, beers, and a cul-de-sac full of fascinating strangers ribbing each other about body counts (the sex kind, not the death kind) and trading gnarliest medical anecdotes — is, by nearly universal critical agreement, the single best scene in the series. Over burgers and beers, the crew assembles: Alfre Woodard as Judy, a former investigative journalist described as a “chatty Nancy Drew” who stalks new residents online because she misses being on the beat; Clarke Peters as her philosophical stoner husband Art, a marijuana enthusiast who claims to be golfing each morning but is really tending to his hallucinogens in the desert and has developed a therapeutic relationship with a crow; Geena Davis as Renee, a former music manager turned art teacher who drives a convertible and turns heads regardless of age; and Denis O’Hare as Wally, a doctor with Stage 4 prostate cancer who has decided to fill his remaining days with, as he puts it, “cocktails and chaos.”

It’s a genuine pleasure just to hang out with these people. The show is smart enough to know that, and generous enough to let us do it — at least for a while.

Something Is Lurking in the Cul-de-Sac

Genre legend Dee Wallace opens the series with a quietly chilling scene that makes clear something is very wrong in this paradise. By the time Sam wakes up one night to wrestle a giant, spider-legged creature off a neighbor, the horror element is fully in play. The monster — many-limbed, disturbing-mouthed, with stretched limbs that will remind Stranger Things fans of the Demogorgon’s extended family tree — is preying on residents, and it has something to do with cerebrospinal fluid, immortality, and a decades-long conspiracy buried beneath the community’s pristine surface. Secret tunnels are involved. So are caves. So is the eerily youthful face of CEO Blaine Shaw.

Because reporting a monster attack in a retirement community is a fast track to getting moved into The Manor — the Boroughs’ long-term care facility, where residents who “see things” tend to disappear — Sam and his friends are largely on their own. Ed Begley Jr. appears as a memory-care patient whose ramblings turn out to be more than confusion. The show has real things to say about how elderly voices get dismissed, how quickly a credible person becomes “confused” the moment they say something inconvenient. It’s the same dynamic that drives Stranger Things — nobody believes the kids — but with the added sting of ageism layered on top.

Denis O’Hare, who has been the secret weapon of everything from American Horror Story to Michael Clayton, is a particular standout here. His Wally carries a lifetime of loss — including memories of the AIDS crisis that complicate his every choice — and yet remains the group’s most reliably funny presence. One scene has him packing a tote bag for a monster-hunting mission with granola bars and a meat cleaver. Another has him pulling up a YouTube tutorial to pick a lock at a funeral parlor. O’Hare plays it all with such genuine delight that the horror stakes never feel undermined. As Wally sees it, death is “the real monster. Everything else is shadows.”

Alfre Woodard, in a virtual press conference, put it perfectly: “It is a generation, probably, that changed the culture, the status quo more than any other one. What’s really fun about this, and instructive and inspiring about this, is that even in the retirement community, things start to happen — bad things and really weird, scary things — but nobody says, ‘Oh, we don’t know what to do.’ What happens? The boomers saddle up, they get together, and they go to stop it.”

O’Hare offered his own reading of the show’s central metaphor: “What do the old people have? Experience, wisdom, knowledge, life and history, and that ends up being a precious commodity that the monsters suck out all the stuff and turn it into gold.”

Where It Soars and Where It Stumbles

The critical consensus on The Boroughs is warm but not uncomplicated. The cast is almost universally praised — Molina and O’Hare especially, but also Woodard and Peters as a couple of 45 years who still have new things to discover about each other, and Davis, whose Renee gets a genuinely sweet slow-burn romance with a younger security guard named Paz (Carlos Miranda). The show’s score by John Paesano sounds like it was lifted directly from a 1980s Spielberg film, and the production design — retro-futuristic architecture, pastel perfection, a hard-wired home assistant named Seraphim that evokes HAL from 2001 — is gorgeous.

The complaints, where they exist, are consistent: the mystery itself is more familiar than fresh, the villain is exactly who you’ll guess from the first episode, and some of the richest characters — Renee, Art, Judy — don’t get the deep-dive treatment their performers deserve. Several critics also noted that the show scatters its ensemble across separate storylines mid-season, breaking up the chemistry that makes the early episodes so enjoyable. The Hollywood Reporter’s review called the welcome barbecue scene “the single most delightful scene The Boroughs has to offer” — and then noted it was the last time the show really let itself luxuriate in that group dynamic.

Showrunner Will Matthews acknowledged the inherent challenge of the premise at a press conference: “The Boroughs is a place that we want you to want to save.” The show largely succeeds on that front. The setting is immediately vivid, the stakes feel personal, and the eight-episode season moves briskly enough that even the weaker middle stretch doesn’t derail things entirely. Some critics wished for two more episodes to let the characters breathe; others thought it was already two episodes too long. The nature of the beast.

What no one disputes is that the comparison to Stranger Things, while inevitable, only goes so far. Both shows are about a group of friends protecting each other while investigating an institution hiding a supernatural secret. Both lean hard into nostalgia. But where Stranger Things is about kids coming of age and discovering who they are, The Boroughs is about people who already know exactly who they are — and refuse to let anyone take that from them. They’ve lived full lives, buried people they loved, watched their bodies start to betray them, and they are still here, still sharp, still capable of kicking ass. The monsters are almost beside the point.

Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” plays a significant role in the soundtrack, which feels exactly right. The Boroughs is, at its core, a show about people who aren’t ready to go quietly — and making a case, with considerable style and a genuinely remarkable ensemble, that they shouldn’t have to.

All eight episodes of The Boroughs are streaming now on Netflix.

The post Netflix’s ‘The Boroughs’ Review: Stranger Things for Seniors appeared first on Cream.

• Remarkably Bright Creatures, adapted from Shelby Van Pelt’s 2022 bestseller, is now streaming on Netflix
• Sally Field stars as a grieving widow who bonds with a wise octopus named Marcellus, voiced by Alfred Molina
• Lewis Pullman co-stars as a lost young musician searching for his unknown father in a small Pacific Northwest town
• Director Olivia Newman made the film after losing her home in the 2025 California wildfires, giving her a deep personal connection to the story’s themes of grief and rebuilding
• Critics largely praise the performances while noting the film’s crowd-pleasing sentimentality and an underused octopus narrator

Sally Field hasn’t lost a single watt of her power. That’s the first thing you need to know about Remarkably Bright Creatures, Netflix’s warm and quietly moving adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt’s beloved 2022 novel, which sold over two million copies largely on word of mouth and the universal appeal of a grumpy, emotionally perceptive octopus. The film, which began streaming May 8, is the kind of movie that doesn’t get made nearly enough — a gentle, character-driven drama built around people well past their forties, anchored by performances so lived-in and honest that the CGI sea creature sharing the screen with them barely registers as strange.

Field plays Tova, a widow in the fictional Pacific Northwest enclave of Sowell Bay who has been quietly falling apart for decades. Her husband is gone. Her son Erik disappeared in a boating accident thirty years ago — an event the town has always quietly assumed was a suicide. She takes the night shift cleaning job at the local aquarium less out of financial need and more because the sea creatures don’t ask her how she’s doing. Her deepest relationship, it turns out, is with Marcellus — an aging Giant Pacific Octopus who, in the film’s most delightful conceit, is not only extraordinarily intelligent but narrates the entire story via Alfred Molina’s dry, wry, warmly imperious voice-over. Molina, who of course played the eight-armed villain Doc Ock in the Spider-Man films, brings a world-weary humanity to the role that makes you forget, most of the time, that you’re listening to a mollusk.

The Odd Couple at the Heart of It All

Into Tova’s carefully managed solitude drives Cameron Cassmore, played by Lewis Pullman — Bill Pullman’s son, and someone who looks and sounds so much like his father that watching him feels like a gentle trip back to the 1990s. Cameron is broke, aimless, living out of his late mother’s battered camper van, and convinced that his unknown father lives somewhere in Sowell Bay and might be a wealthy local. His van breaks down. Tova sprains her ankle in an octopus-related incident she can’t exactly explain. Friendly grocer Ethan (a lovelorn, big-hearted Colm Meaney) suggests Cameron fill in for her at the aquarium. From there, the shape of the story becomes clear almost immediately.

That’s both a strength and a mild limitation of Remarkably Bright Creatures. The film doesn’t traffic in surprises. The surrogate mother-son dynamic between Tova and Cameron is as inevitable as the tides — she scolds him about chipping gum off floors; he fixes things around her house; they help each other prepare for dates with their respective love interests. Tova is pursued with gentle, terrified devotion by Ethan, while Cameron is charmed by Avery (Sofia Black-D’Elia), the sharp-tongued owner of a paddleboard shop. The central mystery — what really connects these two lost people — will be obvious to most viewers well before the film chooses to reveal it. And yet. The actors rush in and make you care anyway.

Field is simply extraordinary. There are moments in this film where the camera cuts to another actor’s reaction while she’s performing, and you can see that they aren’t acting at all — they’re just watching her, genuinely moved. Pullman matches her with a magnetism that operates just beneath the surface: Cameron is a bit of a mess, a flaky dreamer who’s never held a proper job, and yet Pullman makes him easy to root for. He does his own guitar playing and singing, and is convincing enough that you believe he was once in a pretty good band. His best line in the film lands quietly: “She makes me wanna be on time.”

The supporting cast fills out Sowell Bay with the kind of warmth that makes you want to move there. Kathy Baker, Joan Chen — Twin Peaks alumni — and Beth Grant play Tova’s circle of friends, known as the Knit-Wits, who gather ostensibly to knit but really to gossip and gently push Tova back toward the living. Black-D’Elia makes such a snappy impression as Avery that her limited screen time becomes a genuine disappointment. When Cameron marvels that someone “like my age” owns her own business, she deadpans: “That feels like a you issue.”

The Octopus Problem (And Why It’s Not Really a Problem)

The film’s trickiest challenge was always going to be Marcellus. In Van Pelt’s novel, the octopus gets his own chapters — a full interior life rendered in prose that makes the whimsy feel earned. On screen, translating that into a consistent voice-over narration while keeping him visually present is a tightrope walk, and director Olivia Newman largely pulls it off by making a smart, counterintuitive call: she doesn’t overdo it. Rather than forcing Marcellus into every scene, she sprinkles him throughout, letting Molina’s narration do the connective tissue work without straining the suspension of disbelief past its breaking point.

The CGI, led by Chris Ritvo of Untold Studios, is impressively convincing — Marcellus has real heft and texture and personality, and his occasional escapes from his tank (to explore the aquarium, snack on some fellow residents, and meddle in human affairs) are among the film’s most purely enjoyable sequences. Still, multiple critics have noted the same thing: Marcellus disappears from the narrative for long stretches, and the film occasionally loses something when he does. As one reviewer put it, the poor creature is “happily disappeared from the narrative for a good chunk of the film’s runtime, and no one really seems to miss him.”

The film is also not shy about its sentimentality. Composer Dickon Hinchliffe — best known for Peaky Blinders — is deployed regularly to smooth over moments of discomfort, and the script occasionally states its themes so plainly (Marcellus at one point muses that while he merely wants to escape his tank, “I suspect that what Tova needs to escape lies somewhere deeper”) that you wish it trusted the audience a little more. The puzzle pieces of the plot lock together in your mind well before the film assembles them on screen, and the resolution ties everything up with a neatness that real grief rarely allows.

But here’s the thing: Remarkably Bright Creatures doesn’t need to be remarkable to work. It needs to be honest and warm and well-acted, and it is all three. Cinematographer Ashley Connor finds a sweet spot between Pacific Northwest reality and gentle enchantment — the overcast grays of the coastline, the fog, the drizzle — that grounds the story without making it feel heavy. Newman’s direction is unshowy but confident, and the film’s sense of community in Sowell Bay makes the stakes of Tova’s potential departure to a retirement home feel genuinely consequential.

The Director Who Lived the Story

What makes Remarkably Bright Creatures resonate even more once you know it: Newman — whose previous adaptation was Where the Crawdads Sing — lost her own home in the 2025 Eaton fire while preparing to make this film. Netflix moved her, her jazz-musician husband Steve Lehman, and their two children to Vancouver just two days after the fire destroyed their Altadena house and everything in it. The film’s unit production manager outfitted the family with winter clothes, since they’d arrived with almost nothing — some pajamas, school supplies, a board game, and a bottle of whiskey.

Four days before preproduction began, Newman was touring waterfront properties for location scouts, lingering on the objects inside other people’s homes — pot holders, spatulas, the ordinary accumulation of a life — and being quietly undone by all of it. “I’m being reminded over and over again of everything I’ve lost,” she recalled. “You’ll see a pot holder, and you’ll be like, ‘Oh, my God, I just replaced our pot holders, and I loved them.'”

And yet she stayed. “I remember the day after the fire, being on the phone with my manager and saying, ‘I cannot lose this job,'” Newman said. Field, who lives in the Pacific Palisades and watched her neighbors’ homes burn while her own survived, was also shaped by the fires. “Both Livi and I were gobsmacked,” Field said. “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… gone.”

That shared experience created a bond between director and star that seems to have found its way into the film. Newman has said that watching Field perform Tova’s most vulnerable scenes would sometimes leave her too wrecked to call cut. “I could feel how lost she was. It was how I was feeling at the same time.”

Van Pelt, for her part, has described the moment Sally Field was cast as surreal. “The character of Tova is sort of based on my grandmother, and the two look very similar,” she said. “She was just the perfect person to play that character.” Van Pelt — a Tacoma native who taught herself to write fiction after burning out on a career in economics and finance — spent years watching videos of octopuses escaping their tanks online before the idea for Marcellus clicked into place. She was involved throughout production, sitting in on script read-throughs, spending a week on set, and even appearing as an extra.

The book, which has now sold over two million copies, found its audience the old-fashioned way: one reader telling another. The film feels built on the same principle. It doesn’t ask you to be dazzled. It asks you to sit with these people — a woman who has been swaddling herself in solitude like a ratty old cardigan she can’t bear to throw out, a young man who has never had a father or a home, and an octopus with three hearts and not enough time left to use them — and feel something.

Most viewers will. Field’s third-act monologue, in which Tova finally cracks open her deepest wounds, is a stunner. By all accounts, it has been clearing out theaters. If this is the kind of movie Netflix wants to own Mother’s Day weekend with, consider the mission accomplished.

The post Remarkably Bright Creatures Review: Sally Field Shines on Netflix appeared first on Cream.