Remarkably Bright Creatures: Sally Field and an Octopus Carry the Year's Most Unlikely Drama
Shelby Van Pelt’s novel Remarkably Bright Creatures spent an extended period on bestseller lists largely through word of mouth — the kind of book readers press on other readers with an insistence that can be off-putting until you actually read it. The premise involves a widow working at an aquarium who forms an unlikely bond with an octopus named Marcellus. It is also a missing-persons mystery and a story about grief and the ways humans project emotional intelligence onto creatures who may or may not share it.
The Netflix adaptation, premiering May 8 with Sally Field as the widow Tova, has the kind of casting that immediately clarifies the tonal register. Field is not interested in whimsy. She brings weight to material that could easily become saccharine, and the challenge for any adaptation of this novel is maintaining the emotional sincerity of the Tova-Marcellus relationship without letting it slide into talking-animal sentimentality.
The octopus question is genuinely interesting as a dramatic problem. Van Pelt’s novel gives Marcellus sections narrated in first person, which allows the reader to inhabit his perspective directly. Television cannot do this without either anthropomorphizing the creature visually or using voiceover in a way that will please some viewers and alienate others. How the production handled that translation will be one of the first things critics discuss when reviews land.
For readers of the novel, the more pressing question is whether the human mystery plot lands with the same emotional payoff on screen. The book’s ending earns its sentiment. Whether television can earn the same feeling in the same amount of time is what adaptations are always being asked to prove.