The Netflix Film About an Octopus That Will Change the Way You Think About Eating Seafood

I did not expect to cry over an octopus.

But there I was, somewhere around the final act of Remarkably Bright Creatures, blinking hard at a screen because a digital cephalopod named Marcellus had quietly broken my heart.

The film landed on Netflix on May 8, 2026, and it has been pulling in exactly that reaction from people who swore they were just looking for something cosy to watch.

It is warm. It is gentle. It is the kind of story you put on with a cup of tea.

And somewhere in the middle of all that comfort, it asks a question most of us spend a lot of energy not asking: what is it actually like to be the animal on the plate?

What the Film Is Actually About

The story follows Tova, played by Sally Field, an elderly widow who works the night shift as a cleaner at an aquarium on Puget Sound.

She lost her son years ago. She has recently lost her husband. The nighttime quiet of the aquarium suits her.

There, she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus voiced with dry, world-weary wit by Alfred Molina.

Marcellus narrates the film. He watches the humans fumble through their grief with the faint exasperation of someone who has seen it all and would rather be back on the seabed.

"There is no quiet like the bottom of the sea," he tells us, gazing out at a gaggle of noisy schoolkids.

Directed by Olivia Newman (of Where the Crawdads Sing) and adapted from Shelby Van Pelt’s bestselling 2022 novel, it is, on its surface, a film about the families we build for ourselves.

But the creature at its centre is the part that lingers.

Why a Cartoon Octopus Changes Real Minds

Here is the strange thing. Marcellus is entirely computer-generated. Not a single real octopus appears in the film.

And yet he does something a documentary often cannot. He gives the animal an inner life you cannot look away from.

Once you have spent two hours inside the thoughts of a creature who is bored, lonely, clever, and longing for the ocean, it becomes very hard to think of an octopus as a thing.

This is the same quiet power that made Netflix’s 2020 documentary My Octopus Teacher such a phenomenon. That film followed a real, wild octopus, and it sent a wave of people swearing off seafood almost overnight.

Fiction can pull the same lever. If you have ever watched a film that genuinely shifted how you eat, you will recognise the feeling. We even rounded up 25 vegan documentaries that change how people see food, and several of them, from The Cove to Blackfish, work on exactly this principle.

Story does what spreadsheets cannot. It makes you care first, and think later.

The Science Is Even Stranger Than the Story

The wild part is that the real octopus is arguably more remarkable than the fictional one.

A common octopus carries roughly 500 million neurons, putting its nervous system in the same broad range as a dog’s.

But the layout is like nothing in the mammal world. Only about a third of those neurons sit in the central brain. The other two-thirds are spread through the arms, which is why octopuses are often described as having nine brains: one in the head, and one in each of the eight arms.

Each arm can taste, touch, and react more or less on its own while the central brain sets the bigger goals.

And this intelligence evolved completely independently from ours. Octopuses and humans last shared an ancestor more than 500 million years ago, a simple wormlike creature with nothing resembling a complex brain. As one researcher memorably put it, the octopus is about the closest thing we have to meeting an intelligent alien.

What That Intelligence Looks Like

• They open jars, solve mazes, and use tools, with veined octopuses famously carrying coconut shells around as portable shelters.
• They show distinct personalities, play when bored, and have been caught squirting water at lab staff they apparently dislike.
• They appear to dream, shifting colour in their sleep in ways that may be replays of memory.

A January 2026 review in the journal Biological Reviews offered an updated assessment of sentience in cephalopods, building on years of work concluding these animals are capable of genuine conscious experience.

A landmark LSE report on cephalopod sentience reached a similar conclusion, finding strong evidence that octopuses can feel pain, pleasure, hunger, joy, comfort, and distress.

That is not a "thing." That is somebody.

The Part the Film Leaves You to Sit With

Octopus is still a common ingredient, especially across Mediterranean, Mexican, Korean, and Japanese cooking.

The number of octopuses caught each year has risen roughly tenfold over the past seventy years, and demand keeps climbing.

That demand has pushed the seafood industry toward something genuinely grim: octopus farming.

Welfare experts are close to unanimous that there is no humane way to do it. Octopuses are solitary and territorial, so packing them together leads to stress, aggression, and even cannibalism. There is no agreed humane slaughter method, and proposed farms have floated killing the animals in an ice slurry, a slow and likely painful death for a creature this sensitive.

Here is the detail that gave me chills, and that the film never spells out.

Marcellus lives in an aquarium on Puget Sound, in Washington state.

In 2024, Washington became the first place in the world to ban octopus farming, with lawmakers citing the cognitive abilities of these animals.

The fictional octopus charming millions of viewers happens to swim in the very waters where real octopuses just won a real legal victory. Life and art, gently overlapping.

And it is a reminder that the way we treat sentient animals is not fixed. It is a choice we get to keep making, meal by meal.

Octopuses are not the only animals whose stories are quietly rewriting how people feel. The same instinct shows up when communities rally to save farmed animals, like the 200 chickens rescued after a truck accident in Ohio. Once you see the individual, the category never quite holds together again.

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Leaving the Sea Where It Belongs

I keep coming back to one small thing about Marcellus.

He spends the whole film longing for the ocean he can no longer reach. And the audience, almost without noticing, starts longing for it on his behalf.

That is the trick of a good story. It does not lecture you. It just quietly hands you someone else’s point of view and lets you feel the weight of it.

If a sad, sweet, slightly silly film about a talking octopus is what finally makes you pause at the seafood counter, that is not a small thing at all. That is exactly how change tends to start, with a feeling rather than a fact.

You do not have to overhaul your whole life this week. You can just leave the octopus off the plate, and see how it feels. If you want a gentle, no-pressure place to begin, here is how to start a vegan lifestyle without feeling overwhelmed.

Marcellus would, I think, quietly approve.