How Remarkably Bright Creatures turns loneliness, grief and an octopus into a moving story about found family

There is a particular kind of loneliness that doesn't announce itself. It doesn't weep. It doesn't keep you up at night. It simply becomes the atmosphere you inhabit — so long-standing and so total that you eventually stop registering it as loneliness at all, and start calling it independence. Preference. Routine.

!SPOILERS AHEAD!

Tova Sullivan (Sally Field), the elderly widow at the centre of Remarkably Bright Creatures, keeps to herself and prefers the company of aquatic creatures to her busybody friends. Her no-nonsense exterior masks long-buried pain over losing her husband and son years ago. She has not withdrawn from life, exactly. She has simply arranged it so that life cannot get too close. She works the night shift at a small-town aquarium — mopping floors and tidying up, keeping busy, which has always helped her cope. She is not broken. She is organised around absence.

Cameron (Lewis Pullman), the young man who drifts into her orbit, is broken in a louder, more obvious way — a tumbleweed of a kid searching for his biological father, stranded after his van breaks down. He is unmoored in the way of people who have never had a fixed point to return to. He has nowhere to go and no one waiting for him, and he has worn that fact so long it has started to feel like a personality.

Neither of them is looking for anything. That is the point.

There is a version of the found-family story we know well: the chosen clan, the ragtag group, the friends who become closer than blood. It tends to happen in young adulthood, in the gap between leaving home and building your own.

What we rarely see, in fiction or in life, is what happens to found family when the finders are already old. When they have already lived through the version of family they expected, buried it or lost it, and are now, in theory, past the point of starting again.

Tova is not past it. But she thinks she is. She is trying to finalise decisions about her future — unsure whether to leave her current way of life or stay put. She has reached the part of life where most people are winding down, not reaching out.

Research by North Dakota State University supports what the film instinctively understands. Studies consistently show that friendships are as important as family ties in predicting psychological wellbeing in adulthood and old age. Having someone other than a family member to turn to becomes especially important in late life, when other relationships may have changed or become less available.

The problem is not that found family becomes impossible as we age. The problem is that we stop believing it is possible. The American Survey Center found that around one in three seniors haven't made a new friend in at least five years. The infrastructure for connection — workplaces, universities, the casual proximity of early adulthood — gradually dissolves. And so people like Tova make their peace with the aquarium, the mop, the night shift. With being useful rather than known.

Cameron, meanwhile, has the inverse problem. He has never had the foundations Tova has lost. He is not grieving connection; he is operating in its permanent absence. Together, they bracket the loneliness spectrum — she at the far end of a life, he at the unsteady beginning — and they find each other across that gap in the most unlikely of places.

There is another layer to what makes Tova and Cameron's relationship so quietly radical: they are strangers separated by an enormous gulf of age, who become close despite every social norm suggesting they shouldn't.

At first, they clash over their differing approaches to the job. Cross-generational friendship rarely begins in warmth. It begins in friction — different rhythms, different assumptions about how the world works and who is owed what. The ease comes later, if it comes at all.

Intergenerational friendships break through traditional social boundaries, creating bonds between people who would otherwise never interact. Younger individuals gain wisdom from older friends; older individuals gain fresh perspective and renewed purpose.

Enter Marcellus.

Here is the question neither of them could have answered at the beginning of the film: how do two people this guarded, this different, end up trusting each other?

The answer, as it turns out, is eight-armed and cold-blooded.

Marcellus is a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. And it is through Marcellus — through the shared act of tending to him, speaking of him, being witnessed by him — that Tova and Cameron find common ground.

This is not whimsy. Or rather, it is whimsy backed by science.

Research has consistently shown that more social overtures occur when an animal is present — smiles, direct questions, comments on the animal. Pets act as "social lubricants," breaking down barriers and prompting interaction between strangers.

Substitute one brilliant, cantankerous cephalopod for any of the above, and the mechanism holds perfectly. Marcellus is the reason Tova and Cameron have to keep talking. He is the shared concern, the common language, the excuse to stay in the same room long enough for something real to begin.

The animal does not merely comfort the person in front of it. It opens the space between people. It makes vulnerability possible — not because it demands anything, but precisely because it doesn't.

This is what Marcellus offers Tova and Cameron separately, long before he brings them together. He receives what they cannot yet give each other: their real selves, unguarded.

And then comes the film’s quiet masterstroke: Cameron is not simply a stranger who wanders into Tova’s life, but the grandson she never knew she had. The revelation reframes everything that came before it — their instinctive pull toward each other, their friction, their protectiveness, the strange familiarity neither of them could explain.

Cameron arrives in Sowell Bay searching for a father who, unbeknownst to him, was Tova’s long-dead son Erik. The discovery transforms the story from one about accidental companionship into something deeper and more devastating: two people mourning the same absence from opposite ends of it, finding their way back to family without realising that was what they had been searching for all along.

Crucially, the film does not treat the reveal as a gimmick or plot twist, but as an emotional correction — proof that grief had not ended Tova’s family after all, only interrupted it.

This brings us to what wise Marcellus stated, “humans for the most part are dull and blundering. But occasionally, you can be remarkably bright creatures.”

Directed by Olivia Newman, Remarkably Bright Creatures is streaming on Netflix.