My Octopus Teacher (2020)

I'll be honest with you: I nearly skipped this one. Ninety minutes about a bloke swimming in cold seaweed and making friends with an octopus? It sounded like the kind of thing that plays on a loop in a museum gift shop while children ignore it. But this was my South Africa stop on the A-Z World Movie Tour, so in I went, skepticism and all. And within twenty minutes, I was completely disarmed.

Here's the thing. My Octopus Teacher is not really about the octopus. Not at its heart. It's about Craig, the filmmaker, a man who has hit a wall. Burnout, emotional disconnection, that grey fog that settles over you when you've lost the thread of who you are. His response is to start free-diving every single day into the kelp forests off the South African coast, without a wetsuit, without much of a plan. Just cold water, silence, and whatever he finds down there. What he finds, eventually, is one particular octopus. And the relationship that develops between them, slow and fragile and genuinely earned, becomes his way back to himself.

That framing caught me off guard. I was expecting natural history. What I got was something closer to a quiet memoir about anxiety and recovery, dressed up in extraordinary underwater footage. The dives become rituals. Presence, patience, wonder. The kind of thing you don't realise you've been starved of until someone puts it in front of you.

And the footage really is extraordinary. The underwater cinematography is intimate and fluid, almost dreamlike in the way it moves through the kelp. You feel the cold. You feel the hush of it. The octopus herself is a marvel. Clever, curious, playful, and astonishingly resilient. There are moments in this film that I genuinely couldn't believe I was watching: her pulling a shell over herself for protection, her camouflage dissolving into the texture of a rock face, the extraordinary sequence where she hitches a ride on a shark's back to escape being hunted. And then there's the way she gradually, cautiously, lets Craig close. It's wild behaviour, from a wild animal, and it feels like a privilege to witness.

The emotional payoff, when it comes, hits harder than I expected. Knowing how it ends changes the texture of the earlier sequences in retrospect. There's a melancholy running underneath all the wonder, and the film doesn't shy away from it.

But I do have to be straight with you about the limitations, because they're real. The tone never shifts. It is meditative from the first frame to the last, which works beautifully for a while and then starts to feel like a rhythm you've already absorbed: dive, observe, reflect, repeat. After about an hour, you've clocked the pattern. The film doesn't overstay its welcome in terms of length, but it doesn't vary much either. A single gear, sustained all the way through. For some viewers, that sustained hush will be the whole point. For others, it might start to feel like a loop.

I landed somewhere in the middle. There are passages here that are genuinely profound, the kind of quiet that makes you reconsider how you spend your attention. And then there are stretches where I could feel myself drifting, not because the film had lost me, but because it wasn't giving me anything new to hold onto. It's a film of highs and plateaus, and not quite enough of the former to push it any higher than three stars for me.

Three stars.

Still, as a story about finding connection in unexpected places, about letting the natural world do what therapy sometimes can't, it earns its reputation. If you go in knowing what it is, a slow, meditative, beautifully shot piece of personal documentary filmmaking with a one-note emotional register, you'll likely find it moving. Just don't go in expecting it to change pace. It won't. And in its own way, that stubbornness is almost part of the point.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2020  | Watched: 2025-09-05

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Kids · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US

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