Field is Tova, a cleaner at an aquarium in a picturesque coastal town who struggles to connect with those around her, still tending to the wound she endured after the death of her son years earlier. She now prefers being alone, something she has in common with Marcellus, an elderly octopus voiced by Dr Octopus himself, Alfred Molina. He hates humans, an understandable response to being trapped in a tank by them, but he appreciates the relative calm of Tova who talks to him in detail about her life. When Tova injures her foot, she’s forced to reconsider her solitude with calls from the head of a retirement community where her late husband reserved them space finally needing an answer.

Her loneliness is also interrupted by the arrival of Cameron (Lewis Pullman) a wannabe rocker who starts working alongside her. The pair initially clash, but when Tova realises what they have in common, their lives both stunted by grief and a sense of feeling unmoored, they strike up a friendship, with help from Marcellus.

Held together by Molina’s typically commanding voiceover, Remarkably Bright Creatures is a simple, heart-first drama of broken people trying to put themselves back together. It unfolds leisurely without much in the way of surprise, a minor win for director Olivia Newman after her commercially successful yet often laughably absurd adaptation of another hit book, the Reese Witherspoon-smothered melodrama Where the Crawdads Sing. This is a far less busy film with a tighter focus and a far more entertaining one as a result. I’d argue that the focus could be even tighter at times with some underdeveloped romantic subplots never really amounting to much (Colm Meaney for Field and the charming, but forever underused Sofia Black D’Elia for Pullman) and some stretched sitcom plotting that often turns grounded characters into buffoons, but when tasked with the straighter emotional beats, Field is as compelling, and at times heartbreaking, as ever. Too few films allow older female characters to wrestle with both the ghosts of their past and the fears of their future without treating them like punchlines or figures to be patronised, and while there’s certainly room for more specificity, it does give an often overly formulaic film a more distinctive flavour.

Assistance in that department also comes from Molina’s octopus, who isn’t always made to feel like a natural element of the story (there’s a stretch when it seems like Newman has forgotten about him entirely), but when he’s brought back to the forefront in the final act, there’s a neatly contrived yet sweetly effective and emotionally earned ending, If Newman doesn’t quite get the tears she’s clearly craving, she manages to leave us charmed enough for it not to matter all that much. Remarkable might be a stretch, but decent will do.