Kimber Myers
I don’t actually want to know how the team behind The Legend of Ochi created the imaginary creatures at its gentle heart, for fear of breaking the movie’s cinematic spell. The young Ochi who enchants our teenage heroine in this fantasy adventure is all blue face, big eyes, and outsized ears, and it feels at once designed for maximum empathy from the audience and not designed at all. The Ochi seems completely real, as though this impossibly adorable little guy was on location with Willem Dafoe, Finn Wolfhard, and Helena Zengel.
The wild beauty of the mountains and forests in The Legend of Ochi also seems authentic, lending believability to a story that would otherwise feel like an invention. Shot in Romania, it has a tactile, substantial look that is often lacking in big studio movies done on sets in front of a green screen. This might have been a practical decision; first-time feature director Isaiah Saxon made The Legend of Ochi for just $10 million. Yet even with that small budget, its marvelous practical effects never seem like effects at all, even if an adult brain insists otherwise given the facts we possess about our world and the creatures that inhabit it.
On Carpathia, a small (imaginary) island in the Black Sea that seems at once out of time and set in the ‘80s, residents live in fear of the Ochi. Pets and livestock disappear — or are discovered as torn-up carcasses, with the blame falling on these mysterious, mythical monsters that live in the woods and in the nightmares of the Carpathian people. Intent on their eradication, Maxim (Dafoe) leads a group of young boys, including his adopted son, Petro (Wolfhard), out on a nighttime hunt to kill the Ochi in the forest. For the first time, his daughter, Yuri (Zengel), joins them as they set out. Yet when Yuri, who is friendly to pigeons and caterpillars, later discovers a tiny, trilling Ochi caught in one of their traps, she rescues it and learns that everything her father has told her about her family’s past and the dangerous nature of the Ochi might be a lie.
Geared toward tweens and young teens, The Legend of Ochi is sweet and silly. It has a kid’s appreciation for gross-out humor and minor curse words like “assbags,” which seem all the funnier when they’re shouted by Dafoe at a bunch of minors. Though the Ochi looks like it could be related to Gremlins, the movie itself is closer kin to both Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Beasts of the Southern Wild by way of Wes Anderson, with the sometimes shifting tone that those dueling resemblances might imply. It doesn’t always make logical sense, especially around the choices that its characters make, but it remains largely beguiling in its execution.
This is Saxon’s feature debut, but he has a resume with wonderfully weird music videos for the likes of Björk and Grizzly Bear. As anyone who pored over those Palm Pictures Directors Label DVDs knows, music videos are fertile ground for directorial talent, and Saxon definitely has an eye. The interiors and exteriors in The Legend of Ochi have real texture and weight, and cinematographer Evan Prosofsky (also a music video vet) frames it all with care. The plot is less distinctive; Saxon’s script feels familiar for anyone who’s seen any number of movies where a kid befriends a mysterious creature. Yet for all the times this story has been done before, the Ochi still inspires awe and “awws.”
The team at A24 has smartly created Ochi merch, and even as an adult who doesn’t need a $36 keychain, I’m tempted. But like learning exactly how the creative team brought the little Ochi to life, I fear that having a keychain that doesn’t coo and move like the one on screen here will dispel some of the movie’s magic, and I’d rather remain enchanted for a little bit longer (and remain $36 richer).
B
“The Legend of Ochi” is out now in select theaters. It opens Friday everywhere.
