**7/10: Sally Field delivers a career-highlight performance that transcends the film's otherwise conventional craft, turning a potentially saccharine premise into something genuinely moving about loss, solitude, and second chances.**
The opening moments are a whimsy that feels pitched to a younger demographic. But give Olivia Newman's adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt's novel twenty minutes to settle into itself, and what emerges is something genuinely affecting: a meditation on aging, youth, loss, love, and the unlikely connections that allow us to forgive ourselves and each other.
Sally Field anchors the film with the kind of lived-in performance that reminds you why she's collected two Oscars and a lifetime of respect. She plays Tova, a widow still haunted by her son's disappearance decades earlier, who works night shifts at a small-town aquarium and finds solace in solitude. Field doesn't traffic in sentiment; she finds the specific rhythms of this particular grief, the way it's calcified over years into something that structures her life unconsciously. Watch her hands as she cleans the tanks, or the way she holds her body at a slight remove from the younger staff; this is an actress who understands that her craft is physical, not just emotional.
The film's central conceit is a voiced octopus named Marcellus who observes, judges, and ultimately helps orchestrate the narrative's resolution. Alfred Molina voices the cephalopod with dry wit and surprising pathos, and to Newman's credit, she doesn't oversell the device. The octopus is not magical surrealism here. He is a literary device, a witness who sees what the human characters cannot or will not.
Lewis Pullman does what he can with a character arc that's been rushed to fit the film format, never quite earning its emotional beats. The script, by Newman and John Whittington, brings him into Tova's orbit through a series of contrivances that feel precisely that: contrived. Yet Pullman finds grace notes in the margins, moments of depth the writing doesn't fully explore. He and Field have a late-film scene that transcends the material through the sheer commitment of two fine actors.
Whittington's screenplay deserves credit for balancing comedy and heartbreak without collapsing into bathos. There are genuine laughs here, many courtesy of Marcellus' observations, and the writing understands that loss and humor often coexist in real life. The movie's themes ultimately land with respect for the audience's intelligence.
But here's where the film stumbles: Newman, who showed real visual ambition with *Where the Crawdads Sing*, opts for safe. The cinematography is competent but uninspired, the kind of standard-issue Hollywood warmth that signals "Hallmark drama" without ever taking risks. The aquarium, the small town, and the cabin setting offer opportunities for visual poetry such as the play of light through and on water, the way glass separates and connects us, but the film rarely capitalizes on these possibilities. It looks good; it just isn't distinctive or creative.
This matters because the story itself traffics in the extraordinary: an octopus as moral agent, a decades-old mystery, the slow combustion of human connection across generational divides. The material is brave, but the execution is merely professional. You can feel Newman respecting the source material, honoring the performances, hitting her marks; and yet never quite trusting herself to make something audacious enough to match the narrative's ambitions.
Field, on the other hand, elevates everything around her. She always has. There's a moment late in the film where she learns something that re-contextualizes her entire adult life, and Field plays it not as revelation but as a kind of terrible relief, the way some truths arrive less as shock than as confirmation that the gods are on our side. It's masterclass work, the kind that makes you wish the film surrounding her was half as fearless.
