My Octopus Teacher (2020)

Craig Foster spends a year free-diving the cold kelp forests of False Bay, befriending a common octopus, and the resulting documentary is a quiet, patient thing. The animal is called her because that is what the species is, not because the film has any position on gender. She loses an arm to a pyjama shark, regrows it, mates, tends her eggs, and dies. Foster grieves, and in the process becomes a better father to his son Tom. It is a nature documentary, and it conducts itself accordingly.

The film's omissions are instructive. Set in South Africa, it engages no racial question. Its cast is two white men and a cephalopod. There is no economic critique, no body positivity, no neurodivergent framing of Foster's obsessive daily immersion, though a viewer inclined toward diagnosis could find raw material there. The Sea Change Project, Foster's own conservation outfit, lends the proceedings a soft environmental hum, a reverence for the ocean that stops well short of any climate polemic. The water is precious because it is beautiful and worth protecting, and the film leaves it at that.

Where it leans closest to sermon is the closing meditation on fragility and our bond with the wild, delivered in Foster's hushed voiceover. It is contemplative, not preachy. The lesson arrives as a mood, not a memo. This is a film about a man and an octopus, and it resists the urge to make them stand for anything larger. That restraint, in the present cultural climate, reads as almost old-fashioned. A sommelier of such vintages would note the absence of additives and pronounce it a clean pour.