Octopus makes eager pupils of us all

My Octopus Teacher Netflix

LOS ANGELES • What Charlotte's Web did in the popular imagination for the humble, much-maligned barn spider, My Octopus Teacher sets out to achieve for the eightlimbed mollusk of its title — a creature of great, shimmery beauty and mystery many regard more with bemusement than affection.

That's a PR status that has kept hungry humans high on the octopus' long list of enemies, but Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed's engaging, massively crowd-pleasing documentary goes out of its way to humanize these amorphous aliens of the sea: both through standard anthropomorphic techniques familiar from the nature-doc playbook of Attenborough and Disney alike, and through the empathetic presence of its producer-narrator, South African filmmaker and conservationist Craig Foster.

Foster's unexpected kinship with a single octopus, encountered while diving in the richly populated kelp forest of South Africa's Cape of Storms, gives this simply framed doc its narrative thrust and emotional heft. Cynics might balk at the film's aggressive manipulation of the heartstrings, but there's little denying the combined effectiveness of its ravishingly filmed underwater observation and its unabashed but earnest psychological projection.

A word of mouth phenomenon since its Netflix première in September, My Octopus Teacher is a surprisingly rare example of an international South African hit centred on the country's richly diverse environmental tapestry: One can only expect a trail of comparable works in its wake.

As Foster tells it, free diving in the local seaforest near his Cape Town home provided the therapeutic balm he was looking for; a surprising soul connection with a spirited octopus was an unplanned bonus.

The female octopus in question is but one attraction in a splashily filled colouring book of wafting kelp, electric-bright fish, knobbly crustaceans and darting, Beetlejuice-striped pyjama sharks — a consistent threat to our tentacled friend.

We also observe her crafty sneak-attacks on her own prey, her seemingly whimsical taunting of passing shoals of fish and further outwitting of those sharks, whose villainous edit here may be rather unfair in the grand circle-of-life scheme of things, but fits the film's tidy, family-friendly storytelling.

NETFLIX Craig Foster's unexpected kinship with an octopus gives this documentary emotional heft.