There are movies that announce their grief with a funeral, a violin, and somebody staring meaningfully out a rain-streaked window. Remarkably Bright Creatures is not quite that movie. It is more interested in the strange, humiliating, occasionally funny ways grief actually hangs around after everybody else has gone home. Grief here is not a grand tragic event. It is a roommate. It eats your food, rearranges the furniture, wakes you up at three in the morning and refuses to explain why.

Based on Shelby Van Pelt’s novel, the film centers on Tova Sullivan, played by Sally Field, a widowed woman working nights at an aquarium in a small Pacific Northwest town. Tova has also spent decades carrying another, much more unresolved absence: the disappearance of her teenage son Erik. The movie could have treated that mystery as a convenient emotional engine, a Missing Boy-shaped hole around which the plot politely revolves. Instead, the disappearance becomes something messier and more interesting. Tova has survived by making herself useful. She cleans. She works. She shows up. She keeps moving.

That’s one of the film’s sharpest observations about grief: sometimes survival looks suspiciously like having a job.

Tova’s relationship with Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus, gives the movie its oddball emotional center. Yes, this sounds like the sort of premise cooked up by a screenwriter who has recently discovered that octopuses are really smart. And yes, the movie occasionally comes perilously close to the Precious Animal Wisdom genre, where a creature exists primarily to teach a lonely human how to feel again. But Marcellus works because he is not sentimental in the conventional sense. He observes. He remembers. He waits. He is, in his tank, a little eight-armed witness to human beings doing what human beings do best: making enormous messes out of feelings they cannot name.

Tova has turned loss into routine. Marcellus, meanwhile, seems to understand that the past is not past simply because you have learned to live around it.

The other major thread involves Cameron (Lewis Pullman), a directionless young man whose own complicated relationship with abandonment gives him an unexpected connection to Tova. Cameron has spent his life searching for an explanation for why his father disappeared, while Tova has spent hers living with the unanswered question of what happened to Erik. The parallel is not exactly subtle. This is not a movie interested in hiding its thematic machinery under the floorboards. It puts the machinery right there on the table and occasionally lets it clank.

But there is something moving about the bluntness.

Because the movie understands that grief does not always make people nobler. Sometimes it makes them stubborn. Sometimes it makes them lonely. Sometimes it makes them incapable of accepting kindness because kindness threatens the elaborate little fortress they have constructed to keep themselves from needing anybody. Tova’s grief has become part of her identity, and letting other people close means risking the possibility that she might have to become somebody other than the woman who endured the loss.

That is where the film’s gentleness becomes more interesting than its sentimentality.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is full of people who have confused endurance with healing. They have not exactly recovered. They have adapted. There is a difference, and the film keeps circling that difference. Loss leaves a vacancy, and human beings are notoriously bad at leaving vacancies alone. We fill them with work, resentment, fantasies, alcohol, romance, jokes, pets, strangers, memories, whatever happens to be within reach. Sometimes the thing that finally helps is not closure but connection.

And connection, mercifully, does not arrive here as some gigantic Hollywood revelation accompanied by swelling strings and an inspirational speech. It happens through small acts: conversation, companionship, allowing someone else to help, recognizing that another person’s loneliness is not entirely different from your own.

The movie’s biggest weakness is also its biggest defense. It is sweet. Very sweet. At times it threatens to become the cinematic equivalent of a handwritten sympathy card decorated with a tasteful watercolor of an octopus. Some of its revelations arrive exactly when you expect them. Its eccentric characters can feel carefully engineered to be lovable. And yet the sincerity keeps breaking through the machinery.

That sincerity matters because grief is so often represented as either devastation or transcendence. Remarkably Bright Creatures is interested in the shabby middle ground. The dishes still have to be washed. The shift still starts at six. The dead and missing remain dead and missing. You wake up tomorrow carrying exactly the same hole you carried today.

But maybe you don't have to carry it alone.

That is the film’s modest, stubborn proposition. Grief doesn't disappear because somebody gives you a lesson about letting go. You don't defeat it. You don't graduate from it. You learn its weight. You learn where it hurts. And, if you're lucky, you eventually discover that another human being—or perhaps an octopus with an unusually good memory—is willing to sit beside you while you carry it.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is now streaming on Netflix.