Directed by Olivia Newman – Starring Sally Field, Lewis Pullman, Alfred Molina

A grieving woman working at an aquarium forms unexpected connections with a drifter searching for a place to belong — and an unusually observant octopus.

This is kind of a strange movie to talk about because there’s a lot that worked for me, a few things that really didn’t, and somehow I still ended up liking it.

On one hand, it’s a grounded story about grief, loneliness, and people trying to figure out where they belong. On the other, it’s a movie where an octopus becomes oddly central to everything.

Sometimes those two sides fit together.

Sometimes they don’t.

What worked best for me were the human parts of the story.

The performances across the board are strong.

Sally Field is excellent here. Her character feels like someone who has become stuck inside her grief rather than learned to live with it. The aquarium becomes this quiet place of routine and isolation where she can avoid fully reconnecting with the world. Field plays all of that with a kind of worn-down sincerity that really lands.

Lewis Pullman is solid as well. His character is searching for identity, purpose, and some kind of connection, and the movie does a good job making him feel adrift without turning him into a cliché.

Plus, Field and Pullman have a really believable chemistry that helps every interaction between their characters land.

I also loved seeing Colm Meaney show up in a role that basically lets him play a friendly old Deadhead. He brings a warmth to the film that helps balance some of the heavier material, and I don’t usually get to see that lighter side of him.

Alfred Molina is good too, even if the material surrounding the octopus didn’t entirely work for me.

That’s where I struggled a bit.

The octopus storyline occasionally feels superfluous, almost like it belongs to a slightly different movie. Maybe the novel gives those moments more room to breathe or ties them together more cleanly, but here it sometimes pulled me out of the more grounded emotional story I was connecting to.

At the same time, I can’t say the movie didn’t win me over at least a little.

There’s some found-family energy here, a bit of rom-com structure sneaking in around the edges, and enough genuinely heartfelt moments that I stayed invested even when parts of it felt uneven.

It’s also a pretty easy movie to figure out early on, but I still found the ending satisfying — mostly because you end up rooting for things to work out for everyone involved.

It’s not perfect. A little strange. Sometimes overly sentimental.

But it also has a lot of heart.

Verdict: Engaging