Guy Lodge Film CriticWhat “Charlotte’s Web” did in the popular imagination for the humble, much-maligned barn spider, “My Octopus Teacher” sets out to achieve for the eight-limbed mollusc of its title — a creature of great, shimmery beauty and mystery regarded by many with more 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 crowdpleasing Netflix 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.
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