The Legend of Ochi opens in theaters April 25. This review is based on a screening at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
A tale of yearning, rebellion, and magical beings, Isaiah Saxon’s The Legend of Ochi is a whimsical children’s adventure with a beating heart. Its filmmaking isn’t quite pristine, but the folkloric creature at its center, a baby Ochi – a species somewhere between a house cat and a snub-nosed monkey – is brought to life through delightful, detailed puppetry. It’s hard not to fall in love with the critter, and its arrival hastens the story of a teenage girl, Yuri (Helena Zengel), who leaves her Ochi-hunting father Maxim (Willem Dafoe) behind in the hopes of returning the young foundling to its family. In the process, she discovers parts of her own history, too.
On Carpathia, a fictitious Northern European island, Maxim gathers and trains half a dozen local boys – among them, Finn Wolfhard’s sensitive Petro – to track and kill the wild Ochis he blames for attacking his wife and driving her away. The group brings hellfire and brimstone down on the Ochi – it’s surprisingly vicious! – but Yuri’s world is turned upside down when she discovers a baby of the species in one of her father’s bear traps. She takes the curious, injured animal home just long enough to make the decision to leave for good, abandoning Maxim’s blinkered obsession with the species (and his excuses for where Yuri’s mother might actually be) in favor of reuniting the baby with its kin.
There’s a spark of mischief to the filmmaking here, the kind that’s often missing from the E.T.– and Amblin-inspired movies and shows Wolfhard usually stars in: Stranger Things, , IT, and so on. Rather than simply aping these influences, first-time feature director Saxon channels their imaginative, innovative spirit: A grasp of stunning, fantastical imagery recognizable from his music-video work with the likes of Björk and Grizzly Bear; the adorable lifelike motions of the baby Ochi, whose curiosity and hesitance are heart-meltingly lifelike. Though The Legend of Ochi often fails to establish a top-down (literally and figuratively) view of Carpathia, especially in its action sequences, Saxon brings personality to the setting with mysterious fog and an enticing visual texture through the use of miniatures. It’s almost Middle Earth-esque, but on a much more childlike scale. This is matched by the intimacy and dramatic visual contrast with which the director shoots Dafoe and Zengel’s considered performances, as well as that of Emily Watson, who plays Dasha, a learned hermit Yuri encounters on her quest.
Appropriate for Saxon’s seeming Spielbergian influence, The Legend of Ochi is rooted in a tale of a broken, far-flung family, expressed through simple dialogue turbo-loaded with meaning by its actors. Yuri, for instance, harps on how “stupid” she finds her father’s interests, allowing Zengel to layer silent grudges beneath every word, delivering courageous work that harbors deep-seated pain. Maxim, meanwhile, desperately claims to be “cool,” resulting in a thoughtful performance from Dafoe as a man whose innate goodness is buried deep beneath pain and personal betrayal. The withdrawn patriarch even dons a ludicrous knight’s outfit at one point, Quixotically tilting at windmills as it becomes increasingly clear that there’s much more to the Ochi than meets the eye – and much more to Maxim’s melancholy.
The film takes a deft approach to sound, framing the Ochi’s cries as a dialect unto itself (one that Yuri gradually learns). And while the audio mix can’t quite live up to the promises of a grand and secret Ochi song – the characters call it magical, though it’s somewhat piercing and grating when we finally hear it – the mere concept of a language rooted in emotional harmony becomes a key thematic driving force. It’s an ideal towards which the human characters are forced to work. Saxon’s handful of central players – including the lovable Ochi child itself – are all deeply empathetic, and help create a symbolic but easily digestible family saga for The Legend of Ochi’s young target audience. Even Petro, the only one of Maxim’s surrogate sons who gets a moment in the spotlight, eventually reconsiders his stone-cold disposition.
The result is an old-fashioned children’s adventure movie made with novel tools, containing contemporary environmentalist echoes and Scandinavian reference points that make it stand apart from its forebears. Whether or not it fully works, it’s wonderfully unique.
