The world depicted in The Legend of Ochi is exactly the sort of place you’d expect to find Willem Dafoe – somewhere beautiful and strange that lets him clatter around in a suit of Slavic armour and bellow his words like he’s trying to bring down a mountain. Dafoe plays a man called Maxim, who lives on the fantastical island of Carpathia and has dedicated his life to the eradication of a mythical creature known as the Ochi. These are small orangutans put through the Dark Crystal, Jim Henson-puppet blender, who feast nightly on the village livestock and whom Maxim blames for his wife’s disappearance.
Elsewhere, Maxim mourns his lack of a male heir, so he performs paternity instead with the band of child soldiers he’s gathered around him and the orphan he’s raised as his own – Petro (a wildly underutilised Finn Wolfhard from Stranger Things). This has an obvious ill effect on his introverted but strong-willed daughter, Yuri (Helena Zengel). So, when she comes across a juvenile Ochi caught in a trap, she tends to its wounds and swiftly discovers the animal’s natural curiosity and kindness, forcing her to relearn man’s relationship with nature and begin the fight for peaceful coexistence.
The Legend of Ochi is written and directed by Isaiah Saxon, co-founder of the animation studio Encyclopedia Pictura and director of the music video for Björk’s “Wanderlust”. Certainly, you could call The Legend of Ochi Björk-adjacent – it’s a radical feat of the handmade imagination. Shot on location in Romania, it combines computer-animated effects with an extensive use of puppetry, stop motion animation, and matte paintings for its backgrounds.
It’s exactly the sort of film you wish you could reach out and touch, if only to feel the perpetual mist brush a layer of humidity across your cheek and to dig your fingers into the bristly coat of the little Ochi, who might as well be Baby Yoda in a fur suit. These details are imaginatively staged by cinematographer Evan Prosofsky, who’s somehow managed to craft a look here that exists at the halfway point between the angular German expressionism and the Spielbergian (kids with flashlights make an obligatory appearance).
So much time in The Legend of Ochi is spent traversing these beautiful landscapes looking for something to grab onto – a thought or an emotion – but there’s nothing really here other than the simple conflict between nature and the men quick to whip out their shotguns when faced with the unknown. And every man and boy in Carpathia, without exception, owns a gun. They also wrestle in the moonlight and listen to outdated glam rock; the film never does engage with its vaguely eastern European location beyond the crudest of stereotypes.
David Longstreth’s score unabashedly replicates the sweeping strings of classic John Williams, signalling very early on that Saxon’s film will move, think, and talk like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial – which, in turn, makes its theme of the broken family repaired feel like a foregone conclusion, especially when the absent matriarch (Emily Watson) finally rocks up.
There’s a brief, but promising sequence in which Yuri realises she can speak the Ochi language, a melody of coos and chirrups driven primarily by emotion and sensation. We start to wonder whether she might abandon her neglectful family entirely and unleash her true and feral self that is coiled up beneath her shiny yellow raincoat and Anne of Green Gables braids. Alas, such boldness never transpires. The Legend of Ochi may paint itself as wild and free, but the film still trudges right back home to the conventional by the close of day.
Dir: Isaiah Saxon. Starring: Helena Zengel, Finn Wolfhard, Emily Watson, Willem Dafoe. Cert 12A, 95 minutes
