‘The Legend of Ochi' Review: A24's Family-Friendly Fantasy Is a Richly Imagined, Gorgeously Designed Throwback
With theaters flooded over the recent holiday season by animated and CGI-dependent PG-rated fare, it's reassuring to see a family film that relies on live action, impressive production values and inventive story elements, rather than the enhancements provided by digital technology.
The Legend of Ochi gives free rein to writer-director Isaiah Saxon's remarkably imaginative narrative and visual palette, leveraging his well-regarded reputation directing music videos for the likes of Bjork and Grizzly Bear for a fantastical tale brimming with adventure and originality. With A24 targeting an April spring break release date, Saxon's debut feature looks poised to capitalize on a recent upswing in family moviegoing.
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The film opens with a swooping aerial shot over the mysterious island of Carpathia, secreted somewhere in the broad expanse of the Black Sea. The fictional territory off the coast of Romania sustains a small population of hearty villagers, along with the previously unknown ochi, a primate-like wildlife species with reddish fur, blue facial features and a distinctive musical call. Even though the story is set in 1982, and despite the occasional, jarring appearance of a car or supermarket, the verdant island seems frozen in the 19th century, with its rustic architecture and agricultural customs.
For 12-year-old Yuri (Helena Zengel), a quiet, introspective girl, it might as well be the Dark Ages. Life on her father Maxim's (Willem Dafoe) farm offers scant excitement, leaving her free to pursue her fascination with the natural world — although her dad warns her to avoid the ochi, claiming they killed her mom years before.
Shooting primarily in Romania's Carpathian Mountains with an emphasis on expansive exteriors, the filmmakers take full advantage of the region's rustic beauty, from soaring peaks to dense woods and treacherous rivers, to conjure the fictional ochi's remote habitat, a domain inhospitable to humans. Though the forest-dwelling ochi don't appear to pose much of a threat to the villagers, they fear and revile the creatures nonetheless.
Maxim organizes an armed patrol to hunt and terrorize the ochi, which Yuri reluctantly joins along with her with her adopted older brother Petro (Finn Wolfhard). Out checking his trap lines the next day, she discovers a juvenile that's gotten separated from its mother.
Although it's injured after escaping from one of the traps, Yuri manages to bond with the little critter and treat its minor lacerations after smuggling him home in her backpack. But when the ochi's high-pitched vocalizations alert her Petro to her secret, Yuri is forced to flee, promising the ochi that she'll take it back home.
The filmmakers devote considerable resources toward making the case that the ochis possess a form of language based on their characteristically musical form of communication. These allusions culminate in one of the narrative's most surprising developments, after Yuri's imitations of the young ochi's peculiar chirps and whistles (based on an obscure vocal technique known as hocketing) help her gradually develop a far more meaningful understanding of the species.
Whether Saxon's convictions regarding interspecies communication and wildlife conservation are adequately supported by the script will probably be irrelevant to younger audiences. They're likely to be more captivated by the animatronic ochis, which look like an improbable cross between E.T. and a Gremlin. The animals' handcrafted appearance and reliance on realistic puppetry techniques also link their creative heritage to these two fictional species from '80s family classics.
A similar attention to detail extends to many of the artistic elements evident throughout The Legend of Ochi, typical of Saxon's distinctly bespoke aesthetic. The result is a hyperrealistic natural setting bathed in saturated hues, incrementally manipulated with Saxon's matte paintings and other practical effects, with just a modicum of CGI.
The ochi puppets in particular provide the actors with tactile counterparts that digital effects can't duplicate. This is particularly critical for Zengel, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for her work opposite Tom Hanks in Paul Greengrass' 2020 Western News of the World, and her interaction with ochi characters throughout much of the movie.
She takes these challenges in stride, delivering another absorbing performance by deploying her impressive language skills to open up the world of the ochi for outsiders. Dasha, Yuri's long-absent mother sympathetically portrayed by Emily Watson, is another villager who's awestruck by the ochi. She's completely the opposite of Maxim, a comically inept character whom Dafoe takes on with customarily manic enthusiasm.
It's evident that The Legend of Ochi's production values far exceed what might be expected from a reported $10 million budget, and demonstrate that Saxon can deliver a fully realized vision of a highly original concept. Now it's up to audiences to determine whether it's a classic.
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