85 min | NR | September 7, 2020 | Netflix
A burned-out filmmaker starts free-diving in a freezing South African kelp forest and befriends an octopus. It sounds like a setup for self-help nonsense. It turns out to be something stranger and harder to shake.
Craig Foster is a documentary filmmaker who has burned out. He starts free-diving in a freezing kelp forest off the South African coast without a wetsuit or a tank. One day he finds a common octopus living in a den on the seafloor. He returns to the same patch of ocean nearly every day for a year. The film tracks the relationship that forms between a man and an invertebrate, and what that relationship does to the man. Beneath the nature footage, this is a film about a person rebuilding himself by paying sustained attention to something other than himself.
The film belongs to Craig Foster, who narrates throughout and appears as himself. He talks to the camera about his exhaustion and his slow recovery without dressing either up as wisdom. Foster is not a polished on-screen presence, and the film is better for it. He describes the octopus with the precision of a naturalist and the attachment of a friend, and he does not flinch from how strange that combination sounds. Tom Foster, his son, appears as the witness to his father’s change and the inheritor of his fascination with the water. The human story works because Foster refuses to pretend he is a neutral observer of his own subject.
Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed direct and write the film. They shoot the kelp forest in long underwater takes that let the octopus move at its own pace. The camera stays close enough to register the texture of the animal’s skin as it shifts color and shape. Ehrlich and Reed cut nearly a year of dives into a single continuous arc marked by the seasons of the forest. The sound design strips the underwater world down to muffled pressure and breath, which keeps the attention on the body in the water. They trust the images and refuse to drown them in a swelling score.
The film risks sentimentality at every turn and keeps its footing. A man projecting human feeling onto a mollusk is a genuine danger, and the film knows it. It earns the emotion by staying specific about the octopus and its behavior rather than flattening the animal into a metaphor. What lingers is not the bond but the discipline behind it, the choice to show up at the same cold patch of water every day and watch. My Octopus Teacher is a nature documentary that doubles as an argument for attention as a way out of despair.