There’s a small A24 family film out called The Legend of Ochi, based on an original script by the writer-director Isaiah Saxon, who cocreated the children’s educational site DIY.org and founded Encyclopedia Pictura, an art collective making short films and music videos for performers like Björk. Legend is Saxon’s feature film debut, and it isn’t getting much attention yet from potential viewers flooding the multiplex to see Sinners and maybe A Minecraft Movie for the second or third time.
The Legend of Ochi is a better, spikier film than I expected, given the marketing campaign, which makes it look like a twee kids’ fantasy with a terrible case of the cutes.
In a way, it’s not the marketers’ fault, because it’s hard to avoid striking twee notes when describing the film. It’s a live-action-plus-puppets-and-animatronics-and-CGI fantasy-adventure film about a lonely preteen girl named Yuri (Helena Zengel) raised to fear the elusive forest creatures called ochi. She defies her family and community when she finds an injured baby ochi and embarks on an adventure to reunite the creature with its family.
Given that, how could it be anything but a glutinous mass of sentimentality with a vaguely environmentalist message?
The eccentric setting of the film helps, as do the darkly comic characters. Shot in Romania, the film depicts a remote, rugged, muddy, and entirely fictional village in the Carpathian Mountains. The inhabitants live in a community that combines the ancient and the modern, with crude, boxy cars driven past sword-bearing locals on horseback. Yuri’s father, Maxim (Willem Dafoe), is a lonely and fanatical ochi tracker spouting old-world religious platitudes and strutting around in fake neo-Roman armor, training up a ragtag band of local boys to hunt the ochi with rusty muskets plus more tech-savvy radar gizmos.
Maxim is obsessed by the loss of his wife, Dasha (Emily Watson), whom he claims was “taken” by the…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
