• Netflix’s Remarkably Bright Creatures debuted at No. 1 on the platform and is already an emotional hit with viewers.
• The film compresses Tova and Cameron’s backstories, fast-tracking their meeting and softening the novel’s slow-burn emotional setup.
• Marcellus the octopus — one of the book’s three narrators — has a significantly reduced role in the adaptation.
• Author Shelby Van Pelt says the film captures her grandmother, who inspired Tova, with an “uncanny” resemblance — and she even has a cameo.
• Despite the changes, the film holds the warmth and message of Van Pelt’s bestselling novel, backed by powerhouse performances from Sally Field, Lewis Pullman, and Alfred Molina.

Netflix’s Remarkably Bright Creatures is already making people cry on TikTok, and for good reason. The adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt’s beloved 2022 novel — starring Sally Field, Lewis Pullman, and Alfred Molina as the voice of a very wise giant Pacific octopus — debuted at No. 1 on Netflix’s top 10 film rankings after premiering May 8. But fans of the book have noticed something: the movie they’re watching isn’t quite the one they read.

The biggest departure isn’t a plot twist or a rewritten ending. It’s subtler than that — and in some ways, more significant. Netflix’s version of Remarkably Bright Creatures rushes Tova and Cameron into each other’s orbits far sooner than Van Pelt’s novel does, and that choice quietly reshapes the emotional architecture of the entire story.

The Book’s Slow Burn Was the Whole Point

Van Pelt’s novel is a deliberate, patient thing. Readers spend a long stretch getting to know Tova Sullivan and Cameron separately — watching them move through their lives, their losses, their daily rituals — before their worlds collide. That distance matters. By the time they finally connect, you feel the necessity of it.

In the book, Tova’s story begins with the death of her brother and the complicated grief that leads her to Charter Village, the senior living home. Cameron, meanwhile, is first introduced at his aunt’s house — the woman who helped raise him — where he stumbles across his late mother’s belongings. He’s a mess. He can’t hold a job. His girlfriend kicked him out. He’s directionless in the most relatable, painful way.

The film essentially skips all of that. When audiences meet Cameron, he’s already in Washington state, already searching for Simon Brinks, the man he believes to be his father. The groundwork — the full portrait of just how lost he is — has been cleared away to get to the heart of the story faster. And while that makes for a tidier two-hour watch, it costs the film something real. You need to see Cameron at his lowest to understand why Tova, and yes, a giant octopus, could change his life.

What Happened to Marcellus

Then there’s the octopus.

Marcellus — the great Pacific octopus at the center of Van Pelt’s story — is one of three distinct narrators in the novel, and arguably the most memorable. His chapters offer something the human storylines can’t: a perspective entirely outside human grief, wise and observational and oddly comforting. Readers fell hard for him. At a recent sold-out event at Gonzaga University’s Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center, one audience member told Van Pelt simply, “I want more Marcellus. I need more Marcellus.”

The film gives Marcellus Alfred Molina’s voice — a genuinely inspired piece of casting, given that Molina famously played Doc Ock in Spider-Man 2 — and the CGI rendering of the octopus is breathtaking. But his presence is actually smaller on screen than it is in the book. The third perspective that made Van Pelt’s novel so structurally unusual gets compressed into something closer to a cinematic pet role. His wisdom is still there, but quieter. The character of Ethan, too, was minimized in order to focus the film’s energy on Tova and Cameron’s relationship.

Van Pelt, for her part, has spoken warmly about the adaptation. She told the Spokesman-Review crowd that Netflix came to her in 2024 wanting to finance the film, and that Field was on board from the very beginning — she’d read the book and wanted in. The author also shared something remarkable about the production’s attention to detail: the creative team gave Field’s Tova an “uncanny” resemblance to Van Pelt’s grandmother Anna, the real-life inspiration for the character, right down to her hair and clothing. “It was like seeing a ghost of my grandmother,” Van Pelt said. “They just nailed it.”

She even has a cameo — look for her in the audience during an open-mic night bar scene.

What the Film Gets Right

None of this is to say the adaptation fails. It doesn’t. The performances alone are worth the watch. Field is outstanding — warm, guarded, quietly heartbreaking. Pullman captures Cameron’s messy vulnerability in a way that feels completely lived-in. And Molina’s voice-over work anchors every scene Marcellus appears in.

Director Olivia Newman, who previously adapted Where the Crawdads Sing, and screenwriter John Whittington clearly understood what made Van Pelt’s novel resonate. The film’s gentleness is intentional. Hollywood Reporter chief film critic David Rooney noted that “its gentle sense of humor and depth of feeling are enough to sweep you away on a wave of emotion” — and that tracks with the TikTok reaction videos that have been flooding the platform since the film dropped.

Kassie Evashevski, the manager at Anonymous Content who helped shepherd the project from manuscript to screen — and who also represents Pullman, Chen, and Molina — put it simply: “It’s not that often, but sometimes, there are blessed journeys from book to screen, and this is one of them. It’s really been a fairytale experience.”

The novel itself has sold roughly four million copies, spent more than 64 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and was a Jenna Bush Hager book club pick. Van Pelt wrote it as her debut, returning to fiction in her 30s after years away from writing — she’d spent her childhood filling notebooks with Little House on the Prairie fan fiction, growing up in Tacoma not far from the Point Defiance aquarium that inspired the book’s fictional Sowell Bay Aquarium.

Her next book, she told the Gonzaga crowd, is about halfway done. It follows a “messy” family and a cat. “They’ve been so much fun to write because they’re such a disaster,” she said.

As for Remarkably Bright Creatures — the film trades the novel’s slow devastation for something warmer and more immediately accessible. For some viewers, that’s exactly what they needed. For readers who fell apart somewhere around chapter twelve, there may be a quiet ache at what didn’t make it to screen. But the core of what Van Pelt built — the idea that grief doesn’t have to be faced alone, even if your companion happens to have nine brains — comes through intact.

“Hope can rise out of anything,” the story seems to say. Even from the bottom of a tank.

The post How Netflix’s ‘Remarkably Bright Creatures’ Changes the Book appeared first on Cream.

• Netflix’s May 2026 lineup mixes major new originals like Remarkably Bright Creatures with deep-catalogue classics
• Coen brothers, Scorsese, Spielberg, and Yorgos Lanthimos all have films streaming now
• Award-winners including Green Book, Hacksaw Ridge, and Schindler’s List are all available this month
• Mother’s Day weekend has some genuinely great options — from Dumplin’ to Bird Box to Steel Magnolias
• Apex is currently topping Netflix’s own charts, but the real gems are buried deeper in the library

Spring on Netflix is a quieter awards season — the platform saves its big prestige swings for fall and winter — but May 2026 has quietly become one of the richer months for movie lovers in a while. Between a brand-new Sally Field drama, a Yorgos Lanthimos original, and a deep bench of genuine classics, there’s something here for every kind of viewer. Here’s everything worth your time right now.

The Big New Addition: Remarkably Bright Creatures

Remarkably Bright Creatures is the one to start with. Based on Shelby Van Pelt’s bestselling novel, director Olivia Newman’s film follows Tova Sullivan (Sally Field, doing what Sally Field does), a widow who takes a night-cleaning job at a small-town aquarium. Her unlikely companion is Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus voiced with warmth and dry wit by Alfred Molina. The story expands to include Lewis Pullman as a young man named Cameron who rolls into town searching for his father — and the three storylines weave together in ways that are quietly devastating.

It’s tender, it’s smart, and Field is transcendent. This one’s already generating real word-of-mouth.

The Lanthimos You Might Have Missed

Yorgos Lanthimos reunited with Emma Stone — his Poor Things Oscar winner — for Bugonia, a darkly comic remake of the South Korean cult film Save the Green Planet! Stone plays opposite Jesse Plemons as part of a troubled pair of cousins who become convinced that a powerful CEO is actually an alien — and decide to kidnap her. It doesn’t entirely cohere, but Stone and Plemons are electric together, and early takes that were lukewarm are already being revisited by viewers who caught something on a second watch. At 1 hour 58 minutes, it’s worth the gamble.

The Classics Worth (Re)Discovering

Netflix has quietly loaded up on heavy hitters this month, and the catalogue section is genuinely impressive right now.

Schindler’s List is streaming, which should never be taken for granted. Steven Spielberg’s personal masterpiece — the story of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) and the hundreds of Jewish refugees he saved during the Holocaust — remains one of the most powerful films ever made. Three hours and fifteen minutes that will stay with you.

Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) often gets overshadowed by Goodfellas, but time has been genuinely kind to it. Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone in arguably the best work of her career, and Joe Pesci doing what Joe Pesci does — all wrapped in Scorsese’s most ambitious visual storytelling. It’s two hours and fifty minutes of Las Vegas mob history that flies.

The Coen brothers followed their Best Picture winner No Country for Old Men with Burn After Reading, one of their most underrated movies. Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, George Clooney, John Malkovich, Richard Jenkins, and J.K. Simmons all playing, essentially, idiots who stumble onto a CIA analyst’s memoirs and make every wrong decision imaginable. It’s hysterical and mean in the best possible way.

And then there’s Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer’s 2014 sci-fi masterpiece with Scarlett Johansson as an alien quietly moving through Scotland, doing unspeakable things to the men she encounters. It’s less a plot than a mood — closer to Twin Peaks than anything you’d call conventional sci-fi — and it’s one of the best films of the entire decade. Unforgettable is not an overstatement.

Nicolas Cage gives one of the performances of his career in Pig (2021), directed by Michael Sarnoski (who went on to make A Quiet Place: Day One and has The Death of Robin Hood coming this June). A reclusive chef living off-grid with his truffle pig. The pig gets stolen. What follows is not the revenge thriller the premise implies — it’s something much quieter and more moving about grief, value, and what we build our lives around.

Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997) remains one of the most misunderstood blockbusters ever made. On the surface: giant alien bugs, young soldiers, absurd action. Underneath: a razor-sharp satire of fascism and the military-industrial complex that gets more relevant every few years. The director of RoboCop doing what only he can do.

The Farrelly brothers’ There’s Something About Mary (1998) holds up better than it has any right to. Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz are genuinely charming, and the film commits so completely to its comedy that it earns most of its laughs even now. Matt Dillon and Chris Elliott are fantastic in the margins.

Doug Liman’s Go (1999) is one of the best post-Pulp Fiction ensemble films of its era — and one that keeps finding new audiences. Taye Diggs, Sarah Polley, and Timothy Olyphant in a fractured, kinetic one-night story that still absolutely rips.

Mike Flanagan — the horror mastermind behind The Haunting of Hill House — directed Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016), and it’s one of those rare sequels that makes you forget the original entirely. More style and tension than a studio horror sequel has any right to have.

Gerard Butler has made a lot of movies, but Den of Thieves (2018) might genuinely be his best. A heist thriller about corrupt L.A. cops, with Butler, 50 Cent, Pablo Schreiber, and a breakout turn from O’Shea Jackson Jr. Dark, propulsive, and underrated. The sequel is also on Netflix if you get hooked.

And Jason Segel does some of the best work of his career as David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour (2015), opposite Jesse Eisenberg as Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky. Five days, two men, a lot of driving through the Midwest — and a quietly devastating portrait of creativity, depression, and what it costs to be brilliant.

The Best Mother’s Day Picks on Netflix Right Now

If you’re planning a Mother’s Day weekend watch, Netflix has you covered across a few different moods.

Dumplin’ (2018) is the warmest option — Jennifer Aniston as a former beauty queen learning to actually see her teenage daughter, with a Dolly Parton soundtrack that makes everything feel like a hug. Bird Box goes darker: Sandra Bullock in one of Netflix’s first genuine breakout hits, fighting mysterious entities to keep her children alive. Still tense, still worth it.

For something more classic, Steel Magnolias is streaming — Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Julia Roberts (in the role that earned her first Oscar nomination and her Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress), and some of the best ensemble work of the late ’80s. Set in a Louisiana beauty salon, it’s funny and gutting in equal measure.

Pretty Woman is also available — one of Julia Roberts’ most iconic performances, and a film with surprising rewatch value decades later. Roberts won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for the role.

And if you want something genuinely strange: Con Mum, a documentary about British chef Graham Hornigold, who is contacted by a globetrotting socialite claiming to be his long-lost mother — and who eventually swindles him out of £300,000. The third-act twist is wild. Not a traditional Mother’s Day pick, but it’s unforgettable.

For a sci-fi spin on the theme, I Am Mother is a smart Australian cyberpunk film about a post-apocalyptic bunker where a robot raises a human child from embryo. When the teenage Daughter lets an outside woman in, everything unravels. Rose Byrne voices the robot. It’ll make you think about what motherhood actually means.

Also worth noting for award completists: Hacksaw Ridge (Andrew Garfield’s Oscar-nominated performance as WWII medic Desmond Doss, plus two Academy Award wins for editing and sound mixing) and Green Book (Best Picture winner, Best Supporting Actor for Mahershala Ali, Best Original Screenplay) are both streaming right now.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is the one to start with if you haven’t yet. Sally Field narrated by an octopus is a sentence that somehow delivers on every promise it makes.

The post Best Movies on Netflix to Watch Right Now (May 2026) appeared first on Cream.

• Sally Field stars as Tova, a grieving widow who befriends a Giant Pacific octopus, in Netflix’s Remarkably Bright Creatures, streaming now
• The film was brought to Field in early galleys by a production company co-founded by her own son, Peter Craig
• Alfred Molina voices Marcellus the octopus, whose CGI form was inspired by a real octopus named Agnetha at the Vancouver Aquarium
• Field and co-star Lewis Pullman improvised much of their on-screen relationship — Field says she knew he was the one the moment he walked in the room
• Reviews are mixed but warm toward the performances, with critics agreeing Field and Pullman are the film’s beating heart

Sally Field has kept a lot of secrets in her career. She’ll keep this one too. Ask her how the octopus in Remarkably Bright Creatures was brought to life on screen — whether there was a real one, a puppet, pure CGI, some combination of all three — and she won’t budge. “I won’t say,” she told the LA Times. “It’s extraordinary what these guys did, but I won’t say so much because it spoils the magic.”

It’s a fitting answer for a movie that runs entirely on magic. Based on Shelby Van Pelt’s bestselling 2022 novel — which spent more than 64 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold four million copies — Remarkably Bright Creatures tells the story of Tova, a 70-something widow working nights as an aquarium cleaner in a small Pacific Northwest town, and the cranky, wise Giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus she talks to while she mops. Voiced by Alfred Molina, Marcellus narrates the whole film, and his last act on Earth, as he puts it, will be to help “the cleaning lady and the juvenile” — the juvenile being Cameron (Lewis Pullman), a scruffy, directionless musician who blows into town looking for the father he never knew.

The film is streaming now on Netflix, and it arrives with a genuinely unusual behind-the-scenes story: the production company that brought it to Field, Night Owl, was co-founded by her oldest son, Peter Craig.

A Family Affair From the Very Beginning

“It was brought to me in galleys before it had been published by a new production company called Night Owl, by Bryan Unkeless and Peter Craig,” Field explained. “And oddly enough, the Peter Craig part of the production company is my oldest son. It’s their first project. I read the first two chapters and said, ‘Yes, yes, I want to do this.'”

Craig — also a writer and showrunner in his own right — was shooting another project in Philadelphia during much of the Vancouver production, so Field didn’t get to see him on set as often as she would have liked. But she used him as a sounding board throughout, calling him when something felt off about a scene or a monologue needed fine-tuning before she’d bring it to director Olivia Newman.

One visit, though, she’ll carry with her forever. They were shooting what she describes as one of the most emotionally critical scenes in the film — on a pier, in pouring rain, about 32 degrees — and Field had been holding onto an enormous amount of emotion for hours, too far from the trailers to even get warm between takes. When they finally wrapped that portion of the scene, she walked up the ramp toward the car. And coming down the ramp, dripping wet, was Peter.

“Down the ramp came my son Peter, dripping wet, running to wrap his arms around me,” she said. “I will hold that memory forever.”

The Octopus, the Chemistry, and the Improv

Marcellus, for the record, is a CGI creation — a spectacular one, according to everyone who’s seen the film — loosely based on a real Giant Pacific octopus named Agnetha who lives at the Vancouver Aquarium and even appears briefly on screen. Van Pelt has said that from the beginning, Alfred Molina’s voice felt inevitable for the character: “It was just very clear from the beginning that this is what he sounds like. This is his attitude. A curmudgeon.” The name itself is a mash-up of the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, which tells you everything about the energy Molina brings to the role.

Field, for her part, was working against an empty tank for most of her scenes — or something approximating one. “Whether there’s a total octopus there all the time or none whatsoever, all of acting is imagining,” she said. “In that way, it’s nothing new.” She and Lewis Pullman have apparently discussed the specifics between themselves and agreed to keep it quiet. The magic, they’ve decided, is better left intact.

What Field is happy to talk about is Pullman himself, and the warmth in her voice when she does is unmistakable. She’d worked with his father, Bill Pullman, at the Old Vic in London in All My Sons, and Lewis had apparently come to see the play — though they never actually met. When he walked into the audition room for Remarkably Bright Creatures, Field knew almost immediately.

“I read with several other actors for the role of Cameron, and then he walked in, and it was it,” she said. “I didn’t say it, but looked at Livy, the director, like, ‘Okay, this is him.'” The two launched straight into improvisation, and a significant amount of what made it into the final film is exactly that — Field as Tova, Pullman as Cameron, just playing.

“He made everything work for me and made it just joyful,” she said. “Even if the scenes weren’t joyful, it was just so gratifying to be with him. I don’t think there are a lot of them like Lewis.”

What the Film Is Really About

Newman, who previously directed Where the Crawdads Sing, co-wrote the screenplay with John Whittington and shot the film almost entirely in Vancouver — Deep Cove standing in for the fictional Washington town of Sowell Bay, with one night of shooting at the actual Vancouver Aquarium for the larger tanks. The production leans into the Pacific Northwest atmosphere, and Field, who has now filmed in Vancouver multiple times, says the city has genuinely claimed a piece of her heart. “I wish Canada would adopt me,” she said. “I’ll do anything.”

Van Pelt, who grew up near Tacoma and wrote the novel during the early months of the pandemic as a kind of homesickness cure, has an executive producer credit on the film and even appears in it briefly — as a bar patron watching Cameron play. She says seeing Field on set was unexpectedly emotional: Tova was written as an homage to her grandmother, and Field’s wardrobe, hair, and the way she carried herself reminded Van Pelt of her so strongly that she had to take a moment to collect herself.

“It was a little strange, because I was like, ‘That’s her, that’s the character, and my grandma Anna is there in her,'” Van Pelt said.

The film has drawn mixed reviews. Variety called it a “melodrama of distinctly average intelligence” and noted that the script’s emotional machinery is heavily telegraphed, while the New York Times was blunter, calling it “bland and sluggish” while still acknowledging that Field can wring emotion from even the most unlikely circumstances — including, yes, a tearful monologue delivered to a mop bucket. Deadline was considerably warmer, calling it “a warm and rather wonderfully old fashioned movie winner” and predicting “there won’t be a dry eye in the house.” The AP landed somewhere in the middle: two and a half stars, respectable and heartfelt, the kind of movie where the tissues will be nearby whether you planned for it or not.

What most reviews agree on is that Field and Pullman are doing the heavy lifting, and they’re doing it well. Field’s “neurotic, kvetching energy” and Pullman’s “drawlingly laidback presence” spark off each other in ways that make the film’s more contrived elements easier to swallow. The supporting cast — Joan Chen, Kathy Baker, Beth Grant, Colm Meaney as a cheerful ex-Deadhead shopkeeper — is largely underused, and a romantic subplot involving Sofia Black-D’Elia could probably have been cut without anyone noticing. But the core relationship between Tova and Cameron, two people filling a grief gap for each other without quite understanding why, is exactly what Field came to this project to explore.

“It’s very hard to find really complicated stories about complicated women that aren’t some sort of romance or other,” she said. “So as I’ve gotten older, it’s certainly gotten nothing but harder. It takes a lot of time and effort to find a project that you want to do — one that talks about older women and what it is to be older. Whether you’re male or female, you’re facing loss as an older person. How do you move on? Where do you live? If you’re alone, what now?”

Why She Can’t Stop

Field is a few months away from turning 80. She’s been performing, in some form, since she was 17. And she’s not finished — she mentioned she’s eyeing a stage project next, though nothing is confirmed yet. Ask her why she keeps going and she quotes Robert Browning: “All that you reach should exceed your grasp, or what’s a heaven for.”

She’s been a celebrity since she was a teenager, and she’s made her peace with what that means — the blinders, the Dodger cap pulled low, the practiced instinct not to look up when she hears something in a crowd. But she’s also clear-eyed about what the work has always given her that nothing else could.

“I found the stage when I was 12,” she said. “Once I found the stage, it was something I couldn’t not do because I was a little girl raised in the ’50s… I had no contact with my voice, my own. I couldn’t hear myself because I was taught not to. Then I found the stage and I found my voice and instead of clamping it down, I could let it out, whatever it was, wherever it came from.”

She paused. “Why have I done this all this time? Because I can’t not do it.”

Remarkably Bright Creatures is rated PG-13 and runs 113 minutes. It’s streaming now on Netflix.

The post Sally Field on the Octopus, Her Son, and Why She’s Not Done Yet 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.

• Remarkably Bright Creatures debuts on Netflix Friday, adapted from Shelby Van Pelt’s 2022 bestseller
• Director Olivia Newman lost her Altadena home in the Eaton fire just four days before preproduction began
• Sally Field leads the film alongside Lewis Pullman, with Alfred Molina voicing an octopus named Marcellus
• Field’s own neighborhood in Pacific Palisades was devastated by the fires, bonding her with Newman on set
• Critics call the film warm and charming, anchored by a powerhouse Field performance

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.

The post Sally Field’s New Netflix Film Has a Remarkable Origin Story appeared first on Cream.

• Remarkably Bright Creatures begins streaming on Netflix on May 8, based on Shelby Van Pelt’s bestselling 2022 novel
• Sally Field stars as Tova, a grieving widow who bonds with a giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus, voiced by Alfred Molina
• Lewis Pullman plays Cameron, a drifter searching for his father whose path becomes unexpectedly intertwined with Tova’s
• Field, 79, was involved with the project before the book even hit shelves — and says it took years to get the screenplay right
• Critics are largely warm on the film, praising Field and Pullman’s chemistry even where they find the plot mechanics contrived

Sally Field has been making audiences cry for over six decades. With Remarkably Bright Creatures, Netflix is banking on her doing it one more time — and from the sound of it, she delivers.

The film, which begins streaming Friday, is an adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt’s beloved 2022 novel, which spent more than 64 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and became a quiet phenomenon in book clubs everywhere. It’s the kind of story that sounds almost aggressively whimsical on paper: a lonely 70-year-old widow named Tova (Field) cleans an aquarium at night and pours her heart out to a giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus, who happens to be voiced by Alfred Molina and happens to be narrating the whole thing. A scruffy drifter named Cameron (Lewis Pullman) blows into town, takes a temp job at the aquarium, and slowly, inevitably, becomes something like family to her.

Don’t worry — the octopus doesn’t talk to them. Just to us.

Director Olivia Newman, who previously adapted Where the Crawdads Sing, brings the same affectionate, soft-touch sensibility to Van Pelt’s material here. Co-written with John Whittington, the screenplay makes smart, purposeful trims from the source novel — losing some backstory and secondary characters, but keeping the emotional core intact and arguably sharpening it for the screen.

Sally Field Fought to Get This Made

Field, now 79, didn’t just sign on to star — she was one of the first people to believe in this story. “It came to me very early in galleys of the book,” she said in a recent interview. “I read a few chapters and said, ‘Yeah, let’s find a way to set this up and get it made.’ But it was a long haul to get it to where it is and to get the screenplay right because it’s a wonderful and complicated little book and all of the pieces had to be in place. You can’t lose the magic.”

For Field, the appeal wasn’t just a great role — though it is that. It was what the story was actually about. “It’s an homage to ocean creatures and to creatures altogether,” she said. “Human beings have an extraordinary connection to creatures. We’re ruining our oceans. We’re ruining the planet. We’re killing each other. Is anything good happening? I don’t know. But in this little movie, there are some good things happening and that’s nice to do in the midst of everything.”

She also connected to Tova in a way that felt personal. During the pandemic, Field got a puppy — a tiny dog named Dashiell Hammett, Dash for short — and found herself understanding for the first time the kind of bond that forms between a lonely person and an animal that can’t talk back but somehow listens anyway. “The story of Marcellus and Tova and how important Marcellus is to Tova resonated in me,” she said.

This is Field’s most substantial leading role since Hello, My Name Is Doris in 2015, and she’s said openly that finding good parts at her age is genuinely difficult. “It’s very hard to find stories that are worth telling,” she acknowledged. “There are more and more roles now for women, but are they better roles? How many of them are really complicated, interesting characters?” Tova, she felt, was one of them — a woman dealing with aloneness, grief, friendship, loss, and healing. Not just looking for a date.

What the Critics Are Saying

Reviews are largely warm, with a few reservations about the plot’s more mechanical contrivances. The consensus seems to be: the film earns its tears, even when it’s working a little too hard to set them up.

The Hollywood Reporter called it “as cozy as an old woolen blanket, as sweet as a mug of hot chocolate,” praising Field as “unsurprisingly fantastic” and singling out a third-act monologue in which Tova cracks open her deepest wounds as “a stunner” — noting that “sniffles rang out across my entire theater.” Pullman, the piece noted, has a rare gift as a scene partner: “Whether Cameron is listening intently to Tova or trying to tune her out, both stars are so attuned to their energy together that you cannot help but feel it under your own skin.”

IndieWire was similarly taken, calling it “a cozy little drama with twists and turns that feel both inevitable and delightful” and praising the adaptation for actually doing the work of adaptation rather than just transcribing the novel. “Taking the best parts of a sweet story, and paring it down to its best bits” is how they put it.

Deadline called it “a warm and rather wonderfully old fashioned movie winner” and predicted flatly: “There won’t be a dry eye in the house.” They also noted that Field’s performance requires “some heavy emotional bridges to cross as well as a light touch” — and that she navigates all of it with the ease of someone who has been doing this for 62 years.

Variety was more measured, acknowledging the film’s pleasures while pushing back on its plotting. The script, they wrote, is “a hokey pileup of intersecting destinies and cornball coincidence,” and the secondary characters — including Joan Chen and Kathy Baker as Tova’s friends — feel “wholly wasted” and “more sitcom-like than convincingly lived-in.” They also noted that the more the film leans on Molina’s voiceover to deliver late revelations, the more it strains credulity, effectively turning Marcellus into what they memorably called an “all-out deus ex mollusca.”

But even Variety conceded that Field and Pullman “spark off each other to amiable and spontaneous effect” — and that fans of the novel “should find the film on point in all departments.”

The Octopus in the Room

Marcellus is a giant Pacific octopus — rust-colored, CGI-rendered with impressive heft and personality by the effects team at Untold Studios — who has spent the last several years in captivity at the Sowell Bay Aquarium near Puget Sound. He is, by his own estimation, vastly superior to humans in every measurable way. He has nine brains, three hearts, and 360-degree vision. He has figured out how to escape his tank, snack on fellow aquarium residents, and return undetected. He is, as Molina voices him, wry, world-weary, and occasionally devastating in his assessments of the people he watches through the glass.

He is also, in his own way, dying — aging out of the years an octopus typically gets — which gives the film a quiet ticking clock that runs beneath the warmer human storyline.

Netflix, it’s worth noting, also distributed My Octopus Teacher, the 2020 documentary that won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature and made an unexpected cultural splash during the early pandemic. Remarkably Bright Creatures is a very different kind of octopus story — fictional, sentimental, explicitly designed to make you cry — but it’s landing on the same platform that made the world briefly obsessed with cephalopod intelligence. Whether that’s coincidence or programming strategy, it’s a good fit.

Field, for her part, has been careful not to give away too much about how Marcellus was brought to life on screen. “I won’t say,” she said when asked. “It’s extraordinary what these guys did, but I won’t say so much because it spoils the magic.”

Field and Pullman: An Unlikely Pair That Works

Field had never met Lewis Pullman before this film, though she knew his father well. She and Bill Pullman had worked together on stage at the Old Vic in London — “a glorious time,” she called it — and she says there’s a reason Lewis is as good as he is. “Bill is such a wonderful actor and man to stand across from the stage. I couldn’t have asked for a better human being.”

The chemistry between Field and Pullman that critics keep pointing to wasn’t entirely scripted. Field says much of what you see between Tova and Cameron grew out of improvisation. “We’d had a brief meeting where he and I began to improv,” she said. “A lot of what you see between the two of them is just improv. It’s me being Tova and him being Cameron.”

Pullman plays Cameron as a perpetual drifter — broke, living out of a battered camper, convinced his unknown father is somewhere in this small Washington town and possibly wealthy enough to change his life. He’s not great at the aquarium job. He is, however, good at showing up for Tova in the small ways that matter, fixing things around her house, listening when she talks. The surrogate mother-son dynamic that develops is, as the Hollywood Reporter put it, “as inevitable as the ebb and flow of the tides” — but inevitable in the best way, the kind where you know where you’re going and you enjoy the trip anyway.

The supporting cast rounds things out with Colm Meaney as a lovelorn local shopkeeper who approaches Tova like she’s a bird he’s afraid of startling, and Sofia Black-D’Elia as Cameron’s sharp, funny love interest Avery — a paddleboard shop owner who gets some of the film’s best lines and, most critics agree, deserved more screen time.

The film was shot largely in Vancouver, Canada — “magnificent Canada,” Field said, with feeling — with one night of filming at an actual aquarium there for the larger tank sequences, and the rest built on a stage.

As for what’s next for Field after this: she’s thinking about the stage. “I’m months away from being 80,” she said. “My next project is on stage, but I’m waiting to see what happens with that.” For now, though, she has this — a film she championed for years, built around a character she had to work to find, opposite a co-star she improvised her way into a relationship with, and an octopus who, in his own cranky, superior way, holds it all together.

“Whatever they want,” Field said when asked what she hopes audiences take from Remarkably Bright Creatures. “You can’t think about that. You have to do the work and let the pieces fall where they may.”

The post Sally Field and a Scene-Stealing Octopus Make Netflix’s ‘Remarkably Bright Creatures’ Worth the Cry appeared first on Cream.