FILM REVIEWS
An Octopus’s Dream:
Dissolving Boundaries in an Interspecies Friendship BY LEE BEAVINGTON | Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Fig. 1 | The kelp forest in Western Cape, South Africa, 0:00:33. Netflix, 2020.
Three months into working on this film, co-director Pippa Ehrlich stopped eating calamari. My Octopus Teacher is a literal dive into the Other: another world, another species, another way of being. The film chronicles Craig Foster’s free dives to the same place over the course of a year. Immersed in an underwater forest, he befriends a shapeshifter that captures his heart. As a biologist, educator, and philosopher, I will frame my review through these lenses. This film is a showcase of mesmerizing octopus behaviour, and the idea of nature as teacher. Through this relationship between man and mollusc emerges a gentle reverence for all things wild. When we first enter the kelp forest (Fig. 1) in the Cape of Storms, we are treated to a fascinating montage of octopus footage, whose significance for this cephalopod heroine become wondrously and alarmingly apparent to us later in the film. We are then pulled out of the ocean and into Foster’s backstory and motivation, where fifty years of human life is squeezed, by the co-directors, into 11 minutes of film. He
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Vol.06, No.01 | Spring 2021
grew up with the Atlantic Ocean crashing on his doorstep. Burnt out from his work on nature-themed documentaries, depressed and disconnected from his young son, he returned to his life’s joy: the cold comfort of the sea, diving without a wetsuit or oxygen tank near his home in South Africa. One day, he stumbles upon a peculiar octopus wearing a complete armour of shells (Fig. 2). This moment plants the seed for this film. The film’s first line of dialogue references aliens. Such lifeforms in Hollywood are typically human-centric: think Star Trek’s bipedal Klingons and Vulcans. The octopuses of Earth have three hearts, blue blood due to swapping copper for iron to transport oxygen, and even edit their own RNA to adapt to the environment (Liscovitch-Brauer 200). None of this is mentioned in the film, perhaps to distance itself from nature documentaries. This is a personal story. There are two stars in this film: human and octopus. One has a name, a voiceover, and a film credit. The other can regrow a severed arm. Both humans and octopuses abandoned something (fur or an ancestral shell) in their
