‘The Legend of Ochi' tells a tale as new as time
Some movies are so original, so confidently humming along on their own peculiar wavelength, that watching them becomes a test of a viewer's taste for the unique. You have to meet such a movie's imagination halfway, and in a popular culture that slavishly caters to our expectations, such deviations from the norm can be startling — upsetting, even.
Which may be why the two young men behind me at a screening of 'The Legend of Ochi' pronounced it 'terrible' as the credits rolled, in the tones of people spitting out an unpleasant hors d'oeuvre, while the young couple gathering their coats in front of me marveled at what they thought was one of the best movies they'd ever seen. Me? A critic watches hundreds of films a year, most of them familiar in shape and story, and it can be too easy to prize the different for its own sake. Yet even when this darkling fairy tale misstepped, I felt secure in the hands of a born filmmaker, and at its best, 'Ochi' evoked in me a rough rapture I haven't felt since 'Beasts of the Southern Wild' back in 2012.
It's a family film, or it's being marketed as one, but as written and directed by Isaiah Saxon, making his feature debut after 20 years of music videos and shorts, 'The Legend of Ochi' seems narrowcast to adventurous 8- to 13-year-olds and any grown-up who has been one. It takes place in an otherworldly Eastern Europe, on an island with one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in 1970s Soviet entropy, with dusty supermarkets and boxy cars that don't run. For generations, the island's humans have waged an on-again/off-again battle with creatures that live in the mountains, big-eared hominids that split off from Homo sapiens sometime after the gorillas but before the Neanderthals. They prey on livestock and unlucky travelers, and a man like Maxim has dedicated his life to hunting them down.
Maxim is played with threadbare macho bravado by Willem Dafoe, which makes sense for an art house movie by way of the Brothers Grimm. The main character of 'The Legend of Ochi' is Maxim's daughter Yuri (Helena Zengel), an unenthusiastic enlistee in his army of little boy monster hunters. Blue-eyed, flaxen-haired and defiantly ungirlish, Yuri mopes around the movie until she discovers a newborn Ochi in one of her father's traps and vows to return it to its mother.
The creature resembles Baby Yoda and is an adorably fierce creation of puppetry, a handmade beast in a film that keeps CGI firmly in the background scenery. The Ochi is as feral as Yuri herself, and as the two venture farther into the deep and dark woods, they find they can communicate in a language of chitters, howls and whistles.
There's quite a bit of comedy in 'The Legend of Ochi,' some of it blunt with a child's impatience for the adult world. But when Yuri stumbles across her estranged mother, Dasha (Emily Watson), the movie moves into loopy, engrossing Joseph Campbell territory.
Dasha has left her husband to tend sheep in the mountains, and Watson plays her as a gimlet-eyed pagan elder (with a wooden hand!) who's not above boiling a bat to cure a bad case of Ochi bite. As the father and his 'toy soldiers' close in on the fugitives — Maxim's lieutenant is a rawboned teen (Finn Wolfhard of 'Stranger Things') who Yuri accurately notes is 'nice only when no one else is around' — and as the mother imparts her eldritch wisdom, 'The Legend of Ochi' becomes a tug-of-war between the Jungian forces of matriarchy and patriarchy, with Yuri and Ochi the monkeys in the middle. 'You cut off my hand!' yells Dasha; 'I saved your life!' howls Maxim, and don't you hate it when Mom and Dad argue?
The style of Saxon's movie is as fluky as its storyline, with digital film stock that's been weathered to add analog grain; an overripe score, heavy on the Wagnerian horns, by David Longstreth of the rock band Dirty Projectors; and a vibe of movies as they existed in the old days, before Marvel universes and intellectual property. The whole thing feels like it was carved from Carpathian oak, buried in a bog and unearthed back in the 1970s, around the time they were inventing home movies of Bigfoot.
All of which would be purposeless if the film didn't work — didn't evoke a cockeyed sense of wonder to carry us over the clumsy bits. Fair warning: If you're the sort of moviegoer who expects movies to behave, to follow familiar patterns of narrative setup and delivery, 'The Legend of Ochi' will probably be your idea of a bad night out — as 'terrible' as those guys behind me pronounced. But if you're up for a film that tells its own tale, rather than the one it thinks you want to hear, this one has a touch of madness to it, and it seems fashioned from love and old parts for people who genuinely don't want to know what's going to happen next. And maybe that's you.
PG. At area theaters. Contains violent content, a bloody image, smoking, thematic elements and some language. 96 minutes.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr's Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
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