Film

My Octopus Teacher

A solitary man spends a year diving daily in a frigid kelp forest off Cape Town, forming an intimate, wordless relationship with an octopus who slowly stops fearing him. It's hushed, meditative, occasionally heartbreaking, and shot with astonishing patience. Less a nature film than a memoir about grief, attention, and what it means to really watch something. For anyone who's ever needed to disappear into the sea for a while.

TMDb rating7.9

If you liked this

Blue Planet II2017

The gold standard of ocean filmmaking—every episode finds something you didn't know existed down there. If My Octopus Teacher made you fall for the sea, this is the encyclopedia version, shot on an obscene budget.

But It's spectacle over intimacy—you get scale and wonder, not the one-on-one closeness that made the octopus story land.

Blue Planet II poster

Free Solo2018

Same DNA: a man alone, doing something obsessive and slightly mad, filmed with extraordinary access and nerve-shredding intimacy. Alex Honnold's relationship isn't with an animal but with risk itself, and it's just as strange and moving.

But The tension is relentless rather than meditative—if you wanted calm, this will instead make your palms sweat.

Free Solo poster

Won't You Be My Neighbor?2018

A gentle, patient documentary about paying real attention to another living thing, human or otherwise. Fred Rogers' quiet radicalism pairs surprisingly well with Craig Foster's underwater patience.

But No ocean, no danger, no wildlife—purely a portrait of kindness, which some will find too soft after ocean drama.

Won't You Be My Neighbor? poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Shape of Water2017

Same emotional engine as My Octopus Teacher—an isolated person finds meaning in a bond with a sea creature that shouldn't be possible—reimagined as full-blown fantasy romance.

Guillermo del Toro's Oscar-winning fable about a lonely woman who falls for an amphibious creature takes the exact premise—an impossible bond with something aquatic and other—and runs it through Cold War fantasy-romance instead of documentary.

But It's fiction, lush and melodramatic, with monster-movie machinery and a full score—nothing like the hushed realism you just watched.

The Shape of Water poster
More like this (8)

Kedi2017

A wandering, warm documentary about the street cats of Istanbul and the people who've quietly organised their lives around them. Same tenderness toward a creature that owes you nothing.

But Looser and more episodic—there's no single relationship at its centre, just many small ones.

Kedi poster

Honeyland2019

A Macedonian beekeeper's fragile, ancient relationship with her bees, filmed with the same unhurried, painterly patience. Gorgeous and devastating in equal measure.

But Subtitled, slow, and considerably sadder—this one doesn't end with anything like uplift.

Honeyland poster

Fantastic Fungi2019

Trippy time-lapse photography turns mushrooms into something alien and beautiful, with the same wide-eyed reverence for a hidden world most of us walk past every day.

But Drifts into new-agey territory that some viewers find a bit much, especially compared to the groundedness of the octopus film.

Fantastic Fungi poster

Grizzly Man2005

Werner Herzog's portrait of a man who believed he'd found kinship with wild bears asks the same question—what does it mean to truly connect with something that isn't human—but refuses to look away from the cost.

But Much darker and more ambiguous; Herzog is interested in delusion as much as devotion.

Grizzly Man poster

The Rescue2021

The Thai cave rescue told through the eyes of the amateur cave divers who pulled it off—another story of underwater patience, expertise, and quiet obsession paying off against the odds.

But It's a thriller with a happy ending baked in, so the tension is more procedural than emotional.

The Rescue poster

My Life as a Turkey2011no page yet

A PBS Nature film about a man who raises a brood of wild turkeys from hatching and becomes, in effect, their mother. Odd, funny, and unexpectedly moving in exactly the way Foster's octopus story is.

But Made-for-TV production values and a slightly hokey tone that the octopus film's cinema polish spoiled you against.

The Red Turtle2016

Strips the octopus documentary's core idea—solitude, ocean, and a nonverbal bond with a marine animal—into pure animated fable, no narration, no science, just image and feeling.

A wordless, hand-drawn animated fable about a man stranded on an island who forms a strange, wordless bond with a sea turtle. It's quiet in a way almost nothing else is, and hauntingly beautiful.

But Zero dialogue and a deliberately slow pace—gorgeous but a real patience test if you need plot to keep moving.

The Red Turtle poster

The Silent World1956

Shows the literal birth of underwater filmmaking as a genre—the technology and daring that eventually made a film as intimate as My Octopus Teacher possible.

Jacques Cousteau's Palme d'Or-winning documentary is one of the first films ever shot underwater with a diving crew, and it's the great-grandparent of everything Foster does with a camera and a wetsuit.

But Dated in its attitudes toward marine life by today's conservation standards, and the pacing is very much of its era.

The Silent World poster

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Recommended by

Creature from the Black Lagoon, How to Train Your Dragon, Grizzly Man, The Playbook, Kes, Microcosmos, Ernest & Celestine, Winged Migration, March of the Penguins, Earth, Never Cry Wolf, Planet Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, Life of Pi, The Fox and the Hound, Blue Planet II, Project Hail Mary, Honeyland, Buck, The Wild Robot, Hoppers, Ponyo, Kedi, Fantastic Fungi, The Red Turtle, The Silent World, Avatar: The Way of Water, Old Enough!, Luca, The Durrells, Gunda, Chasing Coral, Finding Dory