One of the strangest elements of Carpathia, the foggy island location where The Legend of Ochi is set, is how the land is surrounded by a race of (allegedly) vicious primate-goblins called the Ochi.Elevation Pictures
The Legend of Ochi
Written and directed by Isaiah Saxon
Starring Helena Zengel, Finn Wolfhard and Willem Dafoe
Classification PG; 95 minutes
Opens in theatres April 25
For a film about the pains of walking that metaphorical bridge between youth and adulthood, between limitless imagination and cold-hard existence, the beautiful but dramatically shaky The Legend of Ochi feels stuck in a half-formed adolescence. It genuinely wants to say something important and poignant about what we lose when we stop believing in the unreal, but it cannot quite make the leap into figuring out why anybody should be inclined to listen to such heartfelt pleas. Like a wildly sketched picture handed to you by a child not your own, you kind of just pick it up, nod politely, then move on with your day.
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The quasi-fable introduces us to an isolated northern village on a foggy island called Carpathia, where a sullen farm girl named Yuri (Helena Zengel) spends her days in a kind of desperate longing. While the film was shot in and around the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, Yuri’s world is entirely fictional – its inhabitants speak a bizarrely accented English, the technology sits somewhere between 1982 and today, and the area’s architecture ranges in style from woodsy huts fit for the Shire to a vaguely Soviet kind of brutalism.
The strangest element of Carpathia, though, is how the land is surrounded by a race of (allegedly) vicious primate-goblins called the Ochi. The beasts are especially loathed by Yuri’s wild-eyed father (Willem Dafoe), who, lacking any other preoccupations, has marshalled his son (Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard) and a handful of latchkey village boys into a makeshift band of vigilantes determined to wipe the Ochi out.
After Yuri encounters a baby Ochi – who looks like its DNA was spliced together from the bloodlines of Gremlins’ mogwai hero Gizmo, Pikachu and Baby Yoda – the two unlikely friends set off on an adventure into the wilderness, with Dafoe’s character in hot pursuit.
Almost immediately, it feels as if writer-director Isaiah Saxon, a music-video veteran making his feature-film debut here, is carrying around deep, heartwarming memories of childhood afternoons filled with marathon viewings of E.T., The NeverEnding Story, and The Black Stallion. But in interviews, the director has said it took him until his mid-20s to watch such films, so any nostalgic flags are false-planted.
In The Legend of Ochi, Willem Dafoe, left, marshalls his son (Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard) and a handful of latchkey village boys into a makeshift band of vigilantes determined to wipe the Ochi out.Elevation Pictures
Instead, the surreal and often wondrous visuals speaks to a collage of childhood emotions – abandonment, separation, intimidation. When Yuri is accidentally bitten by the fearful young Ochi, the imagery is spiked with something both fantastic and painful, executed through meticulous in-camera techniques. From the puppetry and animatronics powering the young Ochi to the matte paintings and real-world locations backgrounding every epic-scaled scene, Saxon has built a familiar-but-new reality from the ground up.
Yet Saxon’s pen doesn’t go as far or deep as his eye, with his script stumbling in its attempt to spark some kind of connection between Yuri and the audience. Nor does the director have a particularly firm grip on his cast, preferring to devote more attention on the tics and tricks of Ochi. While the proceedings get a dramatic spike of energy from a mid-film appearance by Emily Watson, and Dafoe is as fiercely game as ever, so much of the movie’s emotional weight is placed upon the shoulders of Zengel, who is not mature enough in presence or spirit to carry that burden.
When clips for The Legend of Ochi were first released, a contingent of way-too-online movie fans rushed to decry what they assumed to be the work of Artificial Intelligence, so smooth and clean were Saxon’s images. Certainly no low-budget film could offer such fantastical creations, right? But AI hasn’t touched a single frame of Saxon’s largely handcrafted visuals, which he spent years and untold amounts of sweat equity developing and fine-tuning. Some of us, it seems, are just too eager to expect the worst.
Then again, if you were to feed the screenplays from a handful of ’80s children’s classics into the maw of ChatGPT, well, who’s to say what kind of Legend of Ochi might be born.
