“Remarkably Bright Creatures” is a sweet, sentimental and gratingly-cloying tale of a grieving widow who forms a relationship with the ageing Giant Pacific Octopus at the small town aquarium where she’s the cleaning lady.

It introduces but never really addresses issues of grief and fear of impending death as the narrative contorts itself into one contrived coincidence after another meant to add weight to the plot.

Sally Field weeps about her character’s loss and her fears of the life that shrinks for the last time once the phrase “assisted living” enters the conversation. “Answers” replace aching questions about a mysterious death and Alfred Molina — Sally’s villainous husband in “Not Without my Daughter” — voice-over narrates the running monologue of Marcellus, the octopus in question.

Marcellus takes an interest in Tova Sullivan’s (Field) life, reluctantly. As she lets bits of it out as she chats to his tank, he can guess or even intuit what is going on with a life not unlike his own — winding down.

Hers might still have the veneer of being “full,” but she was shattered by tragedy and is just now facing late life if not end-of-life decisions.

Tova has her gossip-and-knitting circle, The Knit-Wits (Kathy Baker, Joan Chen and Beth Grant), but they’re just going through the motions (and movie tropes) these days. She’s friends with the local deli/quick stop shop owner (Colm Meaney), who might be sweet on her. She has a lovely home with a view.

But the husband who shared that waterside cabin and who made assisted living reservations for them is gone, and that room in the house she keeps shut-up and preserved was for a son who died.

It takes the arrival of musician Cameron (Lewis Pullman of “Salem’s Lot” and TV’s “Outer Range”), on the last teetering legs of a rock stardom dream that dies hard — 30something and living in a van — to give Tova purpose and Marcellus a mystery to ponder and solve. Well, if he can work it out when not fuming about “the hell of a class field trip” at his aquarium home, his efforts to escape from his tank maybe Tova and then Cameron’s confessional chats with the captive critter behind the glass will give him something to work with.

It’s either that or “I can go back and watch algae grow.”

As Shelby Van Pelt’s source-novel came out about two years after Netflix collected an Oscar for the touching and revealing life-intelligence-and-death of an octopus documentary “My Octopus Teacher,” one might leap to the conclusion that inspired “Remarkably Bright Creatures.” That certainly inspired Netflix to want it filmed.

There’s also whiff of “Free Willy” and “Turtle Diary” in the feel-good but unsurprising, anticlimactic twists in the plot. And every potentially emotional turn of events is undone by the unlikeliness of this or the cutesey nature of that.

The octopus has all the punch lines, and in the hands of director and co-writer Olivia Newman (“Where the Crawdads Sing”), none of them merit more than a muted grin.

“I am subservient to a species beneath me in every observable measure.”

At least “day 1401 of my captivity” has a little more to it than watching “algae grow.” But not much.

Rating: PG-13, profanity, deaths

Cast: Sally Field, Lewis Pullman, Joan Chen, Kathy Baker, Beth Grant, Colm Meaney and the voice of Alfred Molina.

Credits: Directed by Olvia Newman, scripted by Olivia Newman and John Whittington, based on a novel by Shelby Van Pelt. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:53