Remarkably Brught Creatures opens on the hush of Sowell Bay’s aquarium, and Sally Field steps into that blue-lit quiet with a mop, a bucket, and an octopus named Marcellus watching her from behind the glass. Field gives the room a pulse, turning the space into a chamber of held breath. Her monologue to the bucket becomes a small act of defiance, a woman insisting that her grief still has shape. The moment gives the film its first true spark, a reminder that the body remembers even when the mind begins to fray.
The director, Olivia Newman leans into the textures of labor: the wet floor, the hum of filters, the slow rhythm of night work. Her direction favors patience over propulsion, which can leave the film drifting, yet the drift has its own quiet pull. The aquarium becomes a vessel for Tova’s interior life, its glass walls holding her sorrow in suspension. Newman’s restraint allows Field to carve out a performance built from breath, pause, and the ache of unfinished conversations.
Lewis Pullman enters with a restless energy that unsettles the film’s stillness. His Cameron carries the exhaustion of someone who has run out of stories to tell about himself. Pullman gives the character a raw, unvarnished edge, and when he throws the ring into the eels’ tank, the gesture lands with a clean, unforced finality. Newman uses this eruption to widen the film’s emotional field, letting Cameron’s search for origin echo against Tova’s fear of disappearing.
The Knit-Wits, played by Joan Chen, Kathy Baker, and Beth Grant, hover at the edges of the story. Their scenes often flatten into broad strokes, yet Newman occasionally lets a sharper note slip through. A glance held too long, a silence that cuts through the chatter—these moments reveal the loneliness beneath their clucking. The film hints at a richer portrait of small-town surveillance, even when the script settles for caricature.
Alfred Molina’s narration as Marcellus gives the film its strangest and most compelling current. His voice carries a weary intelligence that pushes against the story’s softer instincts. When Marcellus retrieves the ring from the eels’ tank, the film edges toward fable, yet Newman keeps the moment grounded in the physical world. The escape attempts, the slippery trail, the bucket lowered to the sea—each gesture becomes a quiet argument for connection across species, griefs, and generations.
Tova’s hallucinations and her fear of dementia deepen the film’s emotional stakes. Newman resists spectacle, letting Field’s stillness do the work. The decision to move into a senior community becomes a turning point not through drama but through resignation. Field plays the moment with a clarity that cuts through the film’s gentler surfaces, revealing a woman bracing for the erasure she believes is coming.
Cameron’s discovery of the ring’s true meaning—EELS as Erik’s initials—reshapes the story’s emotional geometry. The revelation could have collapsed into contrivance, yet Pullman and Field meet it with restraint. Their connection becomes the film’s true hinge, a meeting of two people who have spent years circling the edges of their own lives. Newman lets the moment breathe, giving the audience space to feel the shift without forcing it.
The film’s final passages find Newman at her strongest. The release of Marcellus into the sea carries a muted grandeur, not through spectacle but through intention. Tova’s gesture becomes an act of recognition: of the creature’s agency, of her own grief, of the possibility that endings can open into something other than absence. The bucket returns empty, yet the moment feels full.
The imperfections remain—uneven pacing, thinly drawn supporting characters—but the film’s emotional core holds. Field anchors the story with a performance that refuses to shrink, and Pullman meets her with a sincerity that gives the film its pulse. Newman shapes the material into a meditation on care, labor, and the strange ways lives intersect,even when the world insists on keeping them apart.
Letter grade B. On Netflix
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