The Legend of Ochi opens in theaters April 25. This assessment is predicated on a screening on the 2025 Sundance Movie Competition.
A story of craving, revolt, and magical beings, Isaiah Saxon’s The Legend of Ochi is a whimsical kids’s journey with a beating coronary heart. Its filmmaking is not fairly pristine, however the folkloric creature at its heart, a child Ochi – a species someplace between a home cat and a snub-nosed monkey – is dropped at life by way of pleasant, detailed puppetry. It is laborious to not fall in love with the critter, and its arrival hastens the story of a teenage lady, Yuri (Helena Zengel), who leaves her Ochi-hunting father Maxim (Willem Dafoe) behind within the hopes of returning the younger foundling to its household. Within the course of, she discovers elements of her personal historical past, too.
On Carpathia, a fictitious Northern European island, Maxim gathers and trains half a dozen native boys – amongst them, Finn Wolfhard’s delicate Petro – to trace and kill the wild Ochis he blames for attacking his spouse and driving her away. The group brings hellfire and brimstone down on the Ochi – it is surprisingly vicious! – however Yuri’s world is turned the other way up when she discovers a child of the species in one among her father’s bear traps. She takes the curious, injured animal residence simply lengthy sufficient to make the choice to go away for good, abandoning Maxim’s blinkered obsession with the species (and his excuses for the place Yuri’s mom would possibly truly be) in favor of reuniting the newborn with its kin.
There is a spark of mischief to the filmmaking right here, the sort that is usually lacking from the E.T.– and Amblin-inspired motion pictures and reveals Wolfhard normally stars in: Stranger Issues, , IT, and so forth. Slightly than merely aping these influences, first-time characteristic director Saxon channels their imaginative, modern spirit: A grasp of gorgeous, fantastical imagery recognizable from his music-video work with the likes of Björk and Grizzly Bear; the cute lifelike motions of the newborn Ochi, whose curiosity and hesitance are heart-meltingly lifelike. Although The Legend of Ochi usually fails to determine a top-down (actually and figuratively) view of Carpathia, particularly in its motion sequences, Saxon brings persona to the setting with mysterious fog and an attractive visible texture by way of the usage of miniatures. It is virtually Center Earth-esque, however on a way more childlike scale. That is matched by the intimacy and dramatic visible distinction with which the director shoots Dafoe and Zengel’s thought-about performances, in addition to that of Emily Watson, who performs Dasha, a discovered hermit Yuri encounters on her quest.
Applicable for Saxon’s seeming Spielbergian affect, The Legend of Ochi is rooted in a story of a damaged, far-flung household, expressed by way of easy dialogue turbo-loaded with which means by its actors. Yuri, as an example, harps on how “silly” she finds her father’s pursuits, permitting Zengel to layer silent grudges beneath each phrase, delivering brave work that harbors deep-seated ache. Maxim, in the meantime, desperately claims to be “cool,” leading to a considerate efficiency from Dafoe as a person whose innate goodness is buried deep beneath ache and private betrayal. The withdrawn patriarch even dons a daft knight’s outfit at one level, Quixotically tilting at windmills because it turns into more and more clear that there is rather more to the Ochi than meets the attention – and rather more to Maxim’s melancholy.
The movie takes a deft strategy to sound, framing the Ochi’s cries as a dialect unto itself (one which Yuri progressively learns). And whereas the audio combine cannot fairly stay as much as the guarantees of a grand and secret Ochi tune – the characters name it magical, although it is considerably piercing and grating once we lastly hear it – the mere idea of a language rooted in emotional concord turns into a key thematic driving power. It is a perfect in direction of which the human characters are compelled to work. Saxon’s handful of central gamers – together with the lovable Ochi little one itself – are all deeply empathetic, and assist create a symbolic however simply digestible household saga for The Legend of Ochi’s younger audience. Even Petro, the one one among Maxim’s surrogate sons who will get a second within the highlight, ultimately reconsiders his stone-cold disposition.
The result’s an old school kids’s journey film made with novel instruments, containing modern environmentalist echoes and Scandinavian reference factors that make it stand other than its forebears. Whether or not or not it absolutely works, it is splendidly distinctive.
