My Octopus Teacher (2020) Review – Love Begins With the Willingness to Stay

 

Header illustration for the review essay of My Octopus Teacher (2020).

Illustration created for editorial review purposes.

💭 Short Personal Reflection

My Octopus Teacher (2020) came to me carrying a question I had not expected: what does it take to reach across the divide between entirely different worlds?

In the cold kelp forests of South Africa, a burnt-out filmmaker named Craig Foster encounters a creature that seems almost alien. At first, she is distant, strange, even unsettling. But he returns, day after day. And slowly, cautiously, the octopus reaches out a tentacle and touches his hand.

It is such a small moment. And yet it feels enormous. Watching that quiet communion, I found myself thinking not of the ocean — but of a tiny kitten, crying alone on a street, and the hesitant hand I reached out toward her.

🎥 Film Overview

Directors	Pippa Ehrlich, James Reed
Release	September 7, 2020 (Netflix worldwide)
Runtime	85 minutes
Subject	Craig Foster, filmed in False Bay, Cape Town, South Africa

📖 Story Summary

In the South African nature documentary My Octopus Teacher (2020), directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed and produced by Craig Foster, a filmmaker in the grip of professional burnout returns to the cold waters of False Bay near Cape Town — a kelp forest he has known since childhood — seeking something he cannot name. What he finds is a common octopus, living alone among the rocks and swaying fronds of the Great African Seaforest.

Over the course of nearly a year, Foster dives daily — without a wetsuit, without scuba gear, holding his breath in water that drops to 8 or 9 degrees Celsius — and slowly, painstakingly, earns the trust of a creature with no evolutionary reason to offer it. The octopus survives shark attacks, solves problems, plays, hides, hunts. She teaches Foster to track, to wait, to pay attention with a quality of attention he had lost. And then, in the way of all living things, her story ends — but what she left behind in him does not.

My Octopus Teacher won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 93rd Academy Awards. It remains one of the most-watched documentaries in Netflix history.

🌸 Key Themes

The Space Between Worlds

The kelp forest of False Bay is, as Foster describes it, "much more extreme than our maddest science fiction." An octopus has no skeleton, no common ancestor with us worth speaking of, no apparent reason to find a human presence anything other than a threat. The unfamiliarity between Foster and the octopus is not metaphorical. It is biological, evolutionary, almost absolute.

And yet. The film's central miracle is not that the octopus comes to trust him — it is that Foster becomes the kind of creature she can trust. He learns to move without urgency. To arrive and wait. To be present without imposing. The octopus does not cross the distance toward him. He reduces himself until the space between them is small enough for her to cross.

Curiosity as the Beginning of Love

My Octopus Teacher understands something that most love stories do not: that love rarely begins with recognition. It begins with curiosity — with the willingness to stay close to something unfamiliar long enough to let it become, gradually, less so. Foster is not drawn to the octopus because she is like him. He is drawn to her precisely because she is not. Her strangeness is the invitation.

This is the film's quietest and most generous insight: that the creatures we fear or find unreadable are often the ones most worth approaching — if we can only slow ourselves down enough to let the approach happen at the right pace.

Nature as Teacher, Not Subject

There is a reason the film is titled My Octopus Teacher rather than My Octopus Friend or My Octopus Subject. The octopus teaches Foster something he had stopped being able to access in his professional life: how to be inside the natural world rather than observing it from the outside. How to track, to wait, to notice. And through noticing the octopus, he begins, almost accidentally, to notice himself again.

The film suggests that what we receive from the natural world is not always what we went looking for. Foster went to the kelp forest for solace. He came back changed — reconnected to his son, to his sense of purpose, to the version of himself that had been buried under years of overwork and disconnection.

🎬 What Makes This Film Special

Ehrlich and Reed's Direction: Immersion as Method

Few documentaries achieve the level of physical intimacy with their subject that My Octopus Teacher does. Directors Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, working with cinematographer Roger Horrocks, made the foundational decision to film entirely in the manner of their subject: free-diving, without wetsuits or scuba equipment, waiting for the octopus to come to them rather than pursuing her with zoomed lenses from a distance. The result is footage that feels less like observation than like shared experience — we are not watching the kelp forest. We are inside it.

Ehrlich has described the approach as "experiential filmmaking" — the camera does not explain the ocean, it inhabits it. And the effect on the audience is correspondingly physical: the cold of the water, the quality of the light through the kelp canopy, the particular silence of a world where sound travels differently, all of it arrives not as information but as sensation.

Kevin Smuts' Score and the Language of Attention

Kevin Smuts' score for My Octopus Teacher is one of its least-discussed and most essential achievements. Rather than the orchestral grandeur of conventional nature documentaries, Smuts reaches for something more interior — spare, searching, occasionally suspended in near-silence — that mirrors the quality of attention the film is asking its audience to develop. The music does not tell us how to feel. It creates the conditions in which feeling becomes possible.

Craig Foster's narration walks a fine line that the film navigates with care: personal enough to be moving, restrained enough not to overwrite what we are seeing. At its best, the documentary trusts the images completely — and the images, in turn, repay that trust with something close to wonder.

🌍 Where to Watch

Streaming: Netflix (worldwide)

Note: Availability varies by region and may change over time. Please check current listings in your area.

📝 Final Thoughts

Beneath its nature documentary surface, My Octopus Teacher quietly asks a deeper question: what might we become if we were willing to approach the unfamiliar with patience rather than fear?

My Octopus Teacher is not simply a film about an octopus. It is a film about what it costs us to remain separate from the world — and what becomes possible when we finally, slowly, let something strange become familiar. Foster does not tame the octopus. He becomes someone she is willing to touch. There is a profound difference, and the film knows it.

More than four years after its Netflix premiere, My Octopus Teacher remains one of the most transformative documentaries of its decade — a film that asks nothing more of its audience than sustained, open attention, and gives back something that is difficult to name and impossible to forget.

⭐ Who Will Appreciate This Film

For those who have found, in an unexpected creature or an unlikely encounter, something that rearranged the way they moved through the world. Perfect for a quiet evening when you are ready to be surprised by what attention can reveal. Recommended for viewers who loved An (2015) or Perfect Days (2023) — films that understand that the most important transformations happen not through drama but through the slow, patient accumulation of presence. If that kind of quiet, open-eyed wonder is what you're looking for, My Octopus Teacher will find you exactly where you are.

💭 Personal Note

For many years, I was afraid of cats. Their sharp eyes felt cold to me, almost unreadable. Whenever I saw one on the street, I instinctively kept my distance, certain they belonged to a world I could never quite enter.

But life has a quiet way of softening what we once believed permanent. After years of loving my dog Sol, I came across a tiny abandoned kitten crying endlessly after losing her mother. Hesitantly, I brought her home and named her Yang. And somehow, the very thing I once feared became one of the most beautiful presences in my life.

Yang and Sol became my silent healers. On days when life felt unbearably heavy, they offered a kind of comfort that words could never fully reach. And now, whenever I see a stray cat on the street, I no longer see something cold or frightening. I see a fragile life quietly hoping to be understood.

My Octopus Teacher reminded me of that hesitant first reaching out. Sometimes love begins not with familiarity, but with curiosity. Not with certainty, but with the willingness to stay — one day, and then another, and then another — until something that once felt impossible simply isn't anymore.

그저 그 자리에 오래 머물렀다.
그리고 어느 순간, 닿지 못할 것 같던 마음들이 서로에게 가까워져 있었다.

(A reflection in Korean — because some truths about the fear we slowly learn to let go of feel truer in the language of the heart.)

💬 Join the Conversation

Has there been a creature — a pet, a stray, an animal you encountered unexpectedly — that changed the way you saw a part of the world you had kept at a distance?

Is there something in your life that once frightened you, and that time and proximity slowly transformed into something dear?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments — I'd love to know where you stand.

🎬 More from Cinematic Sanctuaries

If My Octopus Teacher's patient portrait of crossing the space between worlds resonated with you, these films offer their own gentle sanctuaries:

• An (Sweet Bean, 2015) – A Japanese film about the quiet dignity of lives lived at the margins, and the unexpected connections that form when someone finally pays attention
• Perfect Days (2023) – A man who has learned to inhabit his daily world with complete attention — and what that quality of presence reveals about everything around him
• Rent-a-Cat (2012) – A woman who lends out cats to the lonely, understanding that sometimes what a person needs is simply a quiet presence that asks nothing in return
• Still Walking (2008) – Hirokazu Kore-eda's study of an ordinary family day and the invisible threads of love and grief that run through it, unannounced
• Shoplifters (2018) – A film about the family that forms between people who have chosen each other across every conceivable difference

Each of these films offers what My Octopus Teacher offers: the recognition that connection rarely begins with certainty — only with curiosity, patience, and the willingness to return one more time.

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👤 About the Author

Young Lee writes at Cinematic Sanctuaries, exploring stories where the separation between different worlds turns out to be smaller than we imagined — and where what closes it is never certainty, only the willingness to stay.

Read more articles from this author on Cinematic Sanctuaries.