The highest compliment I can pay to The Legend of Ochi is that it’s the kind of movie that would have both fascinated me and freaked me out as a kid in the ’80s. If that’s not what writer-director Isiah Saxon was going for, it’s impossible to say what else he might have had in mind.
Ochi evokes that era through its setting in time (as best that can be discerned), its retro branding, and the presence of Finn Wolfhard, gen X’s most reliable gen Z avatar. It’s also a movie about a friendship between a child (Helena Zengel) and a strange creature who’s under threat: a quintessential ’80s trope.
What most distinguishes the tone of Ochi from similar films of that era is its absolute, unblinking sincerity. E.T. made you cry, sure, but it also had jokes. Ochi and wit are like oil and water, which sounds like a bad thing, but Saxon really commits to the bit. One way to guarantee your movie will have no bad gags is just to have no gags at all.
The movie looks like a fairytale illustration — not by recourse to soft-focus, but rather the opposite. Working with cinematographer Evan Prosofsky, Saxon has produced a live-action film with the qualities of animation. Each element is precisely defined, situated against an epic backdrop of mountains and forest. If nothing else, the movie is an excellent screensaver.
Filmed in the actual Carpathian Mountains, the movie is set on the fictional island of Carpathia. The island’s pastoral folk live in fear of a mysterious species of ape-like creatures, which one man (Willem Dafoe, turning the Dafoe to 11) has taken as his personal mission to eliminate. His personal army is a handful of tween boys sent by their families to take potshots at these livestock-stealing critters.
Zengel plays his daughter, who along with an adopted son (Wolfhard) gets to enjoy Dafoe’s pungent company 24/7. When she finds a child of the species caught in a trap and in need of help, it’s not hard to choose between her dad and the little cutie.
I watched the movie unaware of how the production brought the little Ochi to life, but correctly suspected it was an elaborate labor of love involving practical effects. It’s a considerable technical accomplishment, but what really makes the creature work is Saxon’s ability to blend the adorable and the alien. Like E.T. and Gizmo (from Gremlins), this creature is endearing but far from safe.
Zengel’s character learns as much during a grocery store visit that stands out as a Burtonesque interlude in a movie that otherwise hews to a more lightly stylized naturalism. We seem to be seeing the supermarket through the creature’s eyes: colors impossibly vivid, adult shoppers panicky and grotesque.
For a feature that comes as close to a family film as A24 has ever released, this movie is not afraid to be weird and challenging. That extends all the way up to the climactic apotheosis, which is a beautiful scene but also one that seems to understand it’s not quite as tearjerking as it could have been if Saxon had made the central characters less bristly throughout.
Emily Watson plays Zengel’s estranged mother, who physically resembles Billy Boyd in the Lord of the Rings movies and styles herself a sort of Jane Goodall of the ochi. She helps her daughter with the ochi’s songlike language, which the girl uses to communicate with her little friend. One particularly telling exchange regards the two youngsters’ respective parents.
“Miss,” says the creature.
“I don’t,” replies the girl.
This is a world away from the all-too-real family drama in a masterpiece like E.T. (“He hates Mexico!”), but it holds the syrup at bay. Saxon understands that childhood can be difficult and confusing, which makes the bond between the girl and the creature genuinely resonant.
There’s a pleasing dryness to touches like the sequence where Wolfhard engages one of the younger boys in a training wrestling match that extends to absurd length, the smaller child locked in an endless, futile shove. Seems like a metaphor.
Images courtesy A24
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