The Leg­end of Ochi review – well-craft­ed but tame fam­i­ly adventure

It is a truth uni­ver­sal­ly acknowl­edged, at least at the movies, that any child left unat­tend­ed must be in want of a myth­i­cal crea­ture to befriend. One can only imag­ine how that impulse would be inflamed liv­ing some­where like Carpathia, an island of primeval forests and mist-laden moun­tains where rur­al Slav­ic com­mu­ni­ties caught out of time – some still rid­ing horse-drawn car­riages to mini-marts – ded­i­cate equal time to farm­ing the land and fear­ing it.

Thank­ful­ly for Yuri (Hele­na Zen­gel), the shy and sen­si­tive pro­tag­o­nist of fan­ta­sy-adven­ture The Leg­end of Ochi, from first-time writer-direc­tor Isa­iah Sax­on, there’s mag­ic in the wilder­ness – par­tic­u­lar­ly in the form of the ochi, a reclu­sive simi­an species with red­dish-orange fur, bluish facial fea­tures, and a unique lan­guage of high-pitched, melod­ic chirps and whistles.

Suf­fice it to say, the ochi are adorable, and the mys­ti­cal world they inhab­it has been real­ized in painstak­ing­ly tac­tile fash­ion by Sax­on, who labored for years over the pro­fu­sion of hand­made effects – pup­pets and ani­ma­tron­ics for the ochi, mat­te paint­ings for the land­scape – that give his film a ground­ed qual­i­ty. It’s rare to see such visu­al­ly led fan­ta­sy sto­ry­telling achieved prac­ti­cal­ly (so rare the film’s trail­er trig­gered debate over whether the pro­duc­tion had used gen­er­a­tive AI, prompt­ing Sax­on to per­son­al­ly refute such assump­tions). The film’s at its most breath­tak­ing when sim­ply lux­u­ri­at­ing in the lush, dreamy ambi­ence of its remote land­scape, where alpine lakes abound and there’s always a light haze of rain to the moun­tain air.

Yuri’s mil­i­tant father Max­im (Willem Dafoe), hunts ochi at night, believ­ing if he doesn’t his live­stock will be preyed upon. Yuri’s skep­ti­cal, not least because Maxim’s exces­sive­ly fond of his gold armor. She knows – despite Max­im claim­ing the ochi ​“took his wife” – that her moth­er (Emi­ly Wat­son) left of her own accord, and this ten­sion between father and daugh­ter has become anoth­er sel­dom-vocal­ized schism in their oppres­sive house­hold. After she encoun­ters a baby ochi, injured and alone, Yuri dis­cov­ers this scared lit­tle crit­ter – with over­sized ears and pup­py-dog eyes the size of saucers – is noth­ing to fear, and the girl rebels against her father by resolv­ing to return the ochi to its family.

From there, The Leg­end of Ochi maps famil­iar ter­rain; its themes of kin­ship and coex­is­tence aren’t rev­e­la­tions but moral val­ues the story’s fable-like struc­ture gen­tly yet firm­ly instills. As such, there’s lit­tle mys­tery in the third act and – giv­en the lav­ish melodies and orches­tra­tions of David Longstreth’s 80-minute score – no ambi­gu­i­ty in its play for our heart­strings. The film is a tri­umph of spe­cial effects, cer­tain­ly, but its nar­ra­tive ambi­tions are more mod­est and predictable.

Pro­duced by A24, Saxon’s film harkens back to Amblin clas­sics like E.T.: The Extra Ter­res­tri­al and Grem­lins, where com­ing-of-age fan­ta­sy col­lid­ed with fam­i­ly dra­ma, the emo­tive fris­son between them fueled by a sense of dan­ger and pos­si­bil­i­ty and embod­ied by pecu­liar vis­i­tors from anoth­er place. The former’s defin­ing image, a boy and his alien friend rid­ing a bicy­cle into the mid­night sky, enchant­ed an entire gen­er­a­tion; cer­tain sights and sounds here sim­i­lar­ly fire the imag­i­na­tion, even if they’re shroud­ed in a sto­ry that more often func­tions in thrall to its influ­ences than as any­thing near an orig­i­nal artifact.