The Legend of Ochi

“The Legend of Ochi,” the rare A24 family film, is a charming throwback to adventure movies of the ‘80s like “The Neverending Story” and “The Dark Crystal,” complete with original puppetry that reportedly contains not an ounce of CGI manipulation. It’s one of those swift-moving tales of a girl on a quest, one that will give her a different view of the world than the one she’s been forced into by her parents. Parts of it aren’t perfect, but that’s also kind of its charm in that it feels like a family film made by flesh-and-blood people in an era when computers are doing so much of the work. Even when “The Legend of Ochi” stumbles, it does so in a way that’s almost sweet.

“Legend” takes place on the remote island of Carpathia, a gorgeous landscape of simple people who seem to largely live off the earth. It’s where we meet Yuri (Helena Zengel from “News of the World”), the daughter of Maxim (an always-game Willem Dafoe), who is leading a crew on a hunt for the wild Ochi, creatures that look vaguely simian but with bright colors and high-pitched vocalizations. The opening scene of Isaiah Saxon’s film hums with an intensity not often seen in a family film. It’s a night hunt by Maxim, Yuri, and a team of Maxim’s boy soldiers, kids he’s trained to kill the Ochi. There are gunshots, flames, and Ochi hurling through the trees. It’s a breathtaking way to open a film, and immediately makes you feel like you’re in the hands of a confident filmmaker.

Saxon shifts gears after the prologue to really introduce us to Yuri’s family dynamic. The heavy metal-leaving, caterpillar-owning girl clearly isn’t the favorite of Maxim, who practically ignores her on hunts to train his male soldiers, including a young man he’s practically adopted to lead his team named Petro (Finn Wolfhard). Yuri’s mom Dasha (Emily Watson) left some time ago, creating a vacuum in a home in which Maxim won’t even say her name.

Everything changes for Yuri when she finds a baby Ochi in the woods one day, its leg stuck in a trap. She releases the adorable fellow and tends to its wounds, vowing to return it to its mother. After a truly inspired sequence in a grocery store that ends in Yuri being bitten, she discovers she can speak the Ochi’s language of high-pitched sounds—a lesser writer would have gone the other way and had the Ochi speak English instead of having the protagonist speak the creature’s language—and the two truly begin their journey, one that will take them across Dasha’s path as they’re hunted by Maxim and his team.

Saxon comes from the world of music videos, having helmed them for artists like Bjork, and one can see the craftsmanship of a visual artist inspired by people like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry. It’s not an overly precious film, but its quirky visual flourishes reminded me of Jonze and even the imaginative whimsey of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. It’s a consistently impressive film to simply look at, especially the puppetry, which is expressive without worrying about perfection. So many of edges have been sanded off children’s entertainment that it’s refreshing to see something that recognizes that audiences will meet a movie like this halfway. We know the creatures in “The Dark Crystal” are puppets, but we don’t care. If anything, it makes the movie more charming, a piece of moving art that doesn’t insist upon perfection or some imagined version of fantasy-realism.

In this elaborately conceived world, Saxon directs a quartet of smart performances. Zengel will be underrated because she often cedes focus to what’s happening around her, but that’s a choice and a skill. She quietly conveys the journey of Yuri from a teenager annoyed at the incompetent world around her to a woman who decides to do something about it. Dafoe is the raging fury at the film’s center, using that wonderfully expressive face as only he can. At the same time, Watson finds a different register as another woman in Maxim’s life who figured out he was full of it, too. Wolfhard feels a bit subdued and arguably wasted, but it’s nice to see a face that could draw viewers to the film take a part that’s this un-showy.

Many films that inspired “Ochi” were buoyed by unforgettable scores, and there are stretches of the work by Paul Manalatos that are undeniably lovely. That said, Saxon and his composer also habitually lean too heavily on their music. At least at the premiere in Sundance, the score was sometimes turned up to 11, sometimes overwhelming everything happening on screen. Coming from the world of music and crafting a vision that relies so heavily on sequences without dialogue likely led Saxon to think he needed a non-stop, expressive score. Still, it’s so constant that it might push some people out of the movie.

Much has been written about the lack of originality in family entertainment, with even giants like Pixar resorting to sequels instead of new properties. “The Legend of Ochi” reminded me of how wonderful it can be to see an artist distilling the fiction that changed him into a new vision for another generation, passing down the inspiration from a sort of cinematic parent to child. People will emerge from “Ochi” comparing it to those films from the ‘80s at the top of this review, and some of those people will eventually make art of their own. A couple of decades from now, we may be reviewing a new family film that echoes the Ochi. If we’re lucky.

This review was filed from the world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. It opens on April 25th.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

The Legend of Ochi

Adventure
star rating star rating
96 minutes PG 2025

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