The Legend of Ochi, 2025.
Directed by Isaiah Saxon.
Starring Helena Zengel, Finn Wolfhard, Willem Dafoe, Emily Watson, Razvan Stoica, Carol Bors, David Andrei Baltatu, Andrei Antoniu Anghel, Eduard Mihail Oancea, Tomas Otto Ghela, Eduard Ionut Cucu, and Stefan Burlacu.
SYNOPSIS:
In a remote village on the island of Carpathia, a shy girl is raised to fear an elusive animal species known as ochi. But when she discovers a wounded baby ochi has been left behind, she escapes on a quest to bring him home.
Writer-director Isaiah Saxon has said that with The Legend of Ochi he wanted to make a kid’s movie that didn’t take place in a giant corporate garden. A film that would hark back to the 80s or 90s, without leaning into IP or the trappings of modern blockbuster filmmaking.
Boy, has he succeeded with this Eastern European folk tale, full of the kind of puppetry and pastel paintings that have long-since been replaced by creatures and images rendered on a hard-drive. The problem is that while the awe-inspiring craft elevates it above the competition, The Legend of Ochi is still missing the heart and soul so often absent from the glossy children’s fare it aches to distance itself from.
This should have been rooted in the relationship between Helena Zengel’s Yuri and the titular Ochi, a cute chimera who is part Gizmo, a little bit Grogu, all topped off with the attitude of Ross Gellar’s monkey. Their union is one ripped from the pages of Melissa Matheson’s E.T. screenplay, with a gun-toting organisation forcing the abandonment of this strange monster, only for him to fall into the care of child at the heart of a fractured single-parent family.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Spielberg’s film has echoed through the decades since, but that residual chemistry between misunderstood creature and kid is where the comparison ends. Beyond the fact that Ochi is an adorable piece of puppetry, there never feels a strong enough connection between the two for you to care by the time the intended emotional beats hit towards the end of the film.
It’s a cold journey, intentionally so when it comes to the human characters, who exist in a world of mythical paranoia, mistrusting of the creatures in the wood, as well as each other. Those we briefly get to know are Finn Wolfhard’s conflicted brother, and Willem Dafoe’s militant monster hunter, both stomp across the bleak landscape like they’re in a peak-Terry Gilliam adventure. The perennially likeable Emily Watson also turns up as a Tom Bombadil-type who Yuri meets along the way. None of them are particularly interesting though.
Even if the film fails to kickstart the heart, there are plenty of moments along the way that put to shame films budgeted at ten times the cost of Ochi. The creature work is incredible, from the smallest blue caterpillars through to the simian-sized Ochi elders. It recalls the stunning world building of The Dark Crystal, a film with which Ochi shares a similar bleak tone. There is a sequence in which Yuri and Ochi finally arrive at their destination, which is a huge cave flecked with foliage and moss that feels like a Studio Ghibli backdrop writ large. It’s breath-taking to behold.
Kids will be as enchanted as they are perplexed, whilst the grownups will yearn for the fables found only in the fabric of The Legend of Ochi, rather than the film itself, which is disappointingly free-from-magic in all but the wonderful craft that’s on display.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★
Matt Rodgers – Follow me on Twitter
