An Octopus, Sally Field, and the Tenderness Netflix Cannot Ruin

Some books choose you. I remember opening Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt on a Sunday afternoon, thinking I would read a couple of chapters, and finishing the night with damp eyes and the feeling of having conversed with someone extraordinarily wise who happens to have eight arms.

Now Netflix announces the adaptation premieres on May 8, and the trailer is already circulating with Alfred Molina’s deep voice bringing Marcellus to life — the giant Pacific octopus who watches the world from his tank at the Sowell Bay aquarium. “There may be potential for mutual repair,” Marcellus says of Tova and Cameron, the two broken humans orbiting around him. The line sounds like a veterinary diagnosis, but also like a truth only a cephalopod could deliver with that ease.

Sally Field plays Tova Sullivan, the widow who works night shifts at the aquarium to dodge the stillness of an empty house. Field is seventy-nine and has a career spanning from the Flying Nun to Lincoln. She has nothing left to prove. Perhaps that is why she is perfect for Tova: a woman who also has nothing to prove, but whose quiet presence says everything. Lewis Pullman completes the triangle as Cameron, the drifting young man, with Joan Chen, Colm Meaney, and Kathy Baker in supporting roles that promise more weight than their screen time might suggest.

What worries me — and excites me in equal measure — is Olivia Newman’s direction. Her previous work showed a sensitivity to slow rhythms, to silences that carry weight. This novel needs that. Van Pelt built a story where time moves like the tides, not like algorithms. Netflix’s temptation will be to accelerate, compress, spectacularise. The trailer, at least, suggests they resisted: the shots are long, Noah Kahan’s music accompanies without imposing, and there is a shot of Field placing her hand against the glass of Marcellus’s tank that is worth more than any line of dialogue.

Van Pelt’s book worked because it did something that sounds simple and is nearly impossible: it made us trust in an animal’s intelligence. Not as metaphor, not as a clever narrative device, but as fact. Marcellus thinks, observes, deduces, remembers. He has opinions about humans and, most of the time, those opinions do not flatter us. He is the most honest narrator I have read in years — and he is not human.

If the series preserves that — that patient gaze, that unsweetened tenderness — it will be one of the best literary adaptations of the year. If not, at least we still have the book, which is where we must always return.