Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Remarkably Bright Creatures
2026 · Olivia Newman · Remarkably Bright Creatures on Sightlines
The aquarium is closed for the night. A giant Pacific octopus pours himself out of his tank and slides across the floor, and the music under him is a bass clarinet line from a Mal Waldron composition. It is low and a little sly. He has somewhere to be.
Most of what is interesting about Olivia Newman's Remarkably Bright Creatures is in that image. The film runs on two kinds of attention. The first belongs to Tova Sullivan (Sally Field), a widow who lost her son decades ago and now cleans the aquarium on the night shift. Hers is the attention of routine: the cleaning she can't stop doing, the tidy house, the shift schedule, the same rooms every night. The second belongs to Marcellus, the octopus, whose narration is voiced by Alfred Molina. He is wide awake. He notices things. He works out the story's central mystery before any of the people do, and now and then he leaves the tank to push events along.
Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema in the 1980s, gives us a good way to see what that split does. He sorted films by the kind of image they are built from. In the first kind, which he called the movement-image, a character takes in a situation and acts to change it, and the editing serves that chain from seeing to doing. In the second kind, the time-image, the chain breaks. Characters can only look and endure, and we start to feel time for itself. A grieving widow mopping an empty building at night sounds like the second kind. It is worth saying plainly that this film is not. Its plot is clean. TheWrap's Matt Goldberg noted that it keeps the story neat and doesn't pile on complications. Situations get resolved. The unusual part is who resolves them.
Deleuze has a name for this shape of story: the small form of the action-image. In the large form, a huge situation presses on a hero until he does one decisive thing. In the small form, small acts reveal a situation that was partly hidden. Detective stories work this way, and so does this film. The hidden situation is a secret from the past. Most of the acts that reveal it belong to an animal who can't speak to anyone on screen. Grief has stalled Tova, and she cleans. The circuit from seeing to doing still runs. It has just been rerouted through the tank.
The rerouting is also where the pleasure is. Deleuze called images built on relations the viewer has to hold in mind relation-images, or mental images. His model was Hitchcock, who liked to let the audience know what the characters don't, so that we become a third party to every scene, a knowing witness. Dramatic irony is one of the film's defining traits, and Marcellus's voice is what produces it. Tova and the young drifter Cameron Cassmore (Lewis Pullman) circle a truth they can't see, and we hear the octopus already thinking it. The suspense isn't about what happened. It's about when the humans will catch up. Hitchcock made the audience the knowing third. Newman gives that seat to a cephalopod and lets us sit beside him.
Then there is the question of how an octopus sees. Deleuze's term for an image that puts the act of seeing up front is the perception-image. Cinematographer Ashley Connor built a rig that put the camera inside the wet tank, and Panavision made a custom lens attachment, nicknamed Octovision, to imitate the distortion of looking through water. Deleuze admired what he called liquid perception in French films of the 1920s and '30s, where water loosened the camera from solid ground and fixed points of view. Octovision borrows that texture but keeps an anchor: the wobble is somebody's sight, a particular mind behind the glass. Connor designed her coverage to follow each of the novel's viewpoints without flashy moves, so the three perspectives stay distinct instead of dissolving into each other.
The faces matter more. Connor shot with Panavision Primo lenses, which she calls gentle portrait glass, and this is a film built on faces. For Deleuze, a close-up of a face is the affection-image: a feeling that has been registered and is being held before it turns into action. He described two kinds of face. One is still, a reflecting surface that expresses a single quality, such as wonder. The other is alive with small movements that build toward a breaking point. Field's Tova starts closed, in a stoic, self-contained grief. The arc of the film is the slow arrival of the first kind of face, the face of wonder. Goldberg credited her with keeping the role clear of mawkishness through sheer authenticity, and that restraint is why the arrival lands.
The stranger idea is this. Deleuze begins his discussion of the affection-image with a clock. A flat dial plus the small jerks of its hands, he says, is already a face. Anything that combines a receptive surface with tiny movements can be read as one. An octopus has nothing much like a human face. What Marcellus has is skin. The animators at Untold, working under visual effects supervisor Chris Ritvo, gave him a layered coloring system so they could push or pull his skin tones to signal camouflage or illness, and they gave him eight arms that move independently. Color shifting across a body and movement spread through the limbs add up to a face distributed over a whole animal. When his color turns toward sickness, we read it the way we read Field's stillness.
None of this works unless we believe he is there. André Bazin, the critic most associated with cinematic realism, argued that when the truth of a scene depends on two beings sharing a space, cutting between them is cheating. Newman's insistence on real spaces is a digital answer to that demand. Marcellus was never set against a green screen. He was composited into sets that were physically there and lit on location, and he was built from hundreds of hours of footage of Agnetha, a real giant Pacific octopus at the Vancouver Aquarium. So the two-shot of Field and the creature on either side of the glass reads as one shared room. It is a fake made for the sake of Bazin's honesty. JoBlo's Alex Maidy noticed only that the effect never pulled attention from the drama, which is the point.
The film also shifts who gets to shape a performance. Because Marcellus is digital, editor Tamara Meem could invent scenes with him in the cutting room that were never in the script, re-blocking the creature to fit rhythms the edit discovered. The co-lead in half the scenes could still be directed after the shoot. Molina recorded his narration while watching finished scenes, moving his body as he spoke to feel his way into the water.
The film's ancestors are easy to name, and its debts to them are specific. Babe showed that a made animal could carry sincere inner life and a speaking voice. Life of Pi solved the photoreal animal co-lead who has to register as a creature rather than an effect, and paired it with a survivor's framing narration. My Octopus Teacher supplied close-focus images of a cephalopod and the habit of treating the octopus as a real non-human mind, and Marcellus's credibility depends on both. Newman's own First Match and Where the Crawdads Sing supplied her method: a lonely person finding belonging inside an unlikely structure, and a buried small-town mystery brought up through clean, readable coverage. Its nearest sibling, The Art of Racing in the Rain, faced the same problem of a novel narrated by an animal and anchored its melodrama in the animal's voiceover. What this film will seed is still open. It reached Netflix only in May 2026.
Its significance is modest, and real. It doesn't break the movement-image. It gives that kind of cinema's best seat, the one that sees the whole situation and moves to fix it, to an animal, and makes him believable enough that we stop noticing the trick. Watch it again with that in mind. Notice when you know something Tova doesn't, and whose voice told you. Watch his skin change color. And watch Field's face for the moment it stops holding still out of grief and starts holding still out of wonder.
Concepts in play
- action-image (small form) — A clean, neat mystery of kinship, revealed through small acts. Marcellus works it out before the humans and leaves his tank to move events along, while Tova's grief keeps her stalled in routine.
- relation-image (mental image) — Dramatic irony through Molina's voice-over. The octopus grasps the kinship truth before Tova and Cameron do, which makes the audience a knowing third alongside him.
- affection-image — A film built on faces, shot with Primo 'gentle portrait glass'. The effect extends to Marcellus's layered skin-colour system (camouflage, illness) and his independently moving arms, a face spread across a whole body.
- icon of quality (reflecting face) — Field's stoic, self-contained grief that only gradually admits wonder. The film's arc moves toward the still, reflecting face of wonder.
- perception-image — Connor's perspective-based coverage of the three viewpoints, and the in-tank rig that films from Marcellus's point of view.
- reume (liquid perception) — The custom 'Octovision' lens attachment that imitates the distortion of seeing through water. It borrows the texture of liquid perception but stays anchored to a single subject.