One look at the titular creatures in The Legend of Ochi (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) prompts one to wonder if director Isaiah Saxon is secretly a Gizmo/Baby Yoda fanfic ’shipper. What we know for certain is, he’s a filmmaker who formed his own animation studio and cut his teeth making artistically untethered short films and music videos for the likes of Bjork and Grizzly Bear, and now is a first-time feature director trying to bullseye the sweet spot between Wes Anderson and Steven Spielberg. Ostensibly A24’s first stab at releasing a family-friendly movie, Ochi is a fairy tale-like story about the tense relationship between humans and apelike creatures on an isolated island, starring Willem Dafoe and Helena Zengel – and it shows how much a filmmaker can do with a scant $10 million budget, even if it seems like a bit TOO much at times, ironically.
The Gist: The fictional Black Sea island of Carpathia is populated by two key species: Humans and the Ochi. You know the former – mostly pale in this portion of the world, and mostly judgmental dummies who are a hair too quick to violence. Especially when it comes to the Ochi, nocturnal creatures who resemble chimps crossed with those creepy wide-eyed bushbabies, with patches of blue skin peeking out from beneath orange fur. You will not at all be surprised to learn that the humans deem the Ochi to be a threat. You will also not at all be surprised to learn that Dafoe plays a lunatic: Maxim, who’s taken it upon himself to assemble a militia of teenage boys to hunt the Ochi, and his little group of idiots has recently assimilated into its ranks his daughter Yuri (Zengel, of News of the World fame). Why? The locals believe the Ochi are killing their livestock. Also, Maxim blames the creatures for “taking” his wife/Yuri’s mother, but one only needs to spend a little time with the guy to theorize that she’d rather disappear into the woods than live with this nut.
Here’s the thing, though – Maxim and his crew have yet to bag a single Ochi. They’ve sure burned some chunks of the forest down trying, though. And Yuri, as you might suspect, isn’t so sure about all this. She’s quiet and meek where her father is a bulging-eyed cartoon who sometimes dons a Roman helmet and armor for his fruitless tromps through the woods with rifles, in a truck outfitted with a beeping radar thingy. One day he orders Yuri out to check the Ochi traps and, sure enough, there’s a little fuzzy goober hiding in a stump with a bloody leg. She lures the little guy into her backpack and takes him home for some first aid and an E.T. homage before realizing that bringing the Ochi closer to her wackjob pops is a lousy idea. So off they go back into the woods to find the creature’s mama.
First, they stop at the local supermarket for no logical reason other than to shoplift a half-gal of milk, and create a scene. Then, back to the forest, where Yuri realizes she can communicate with this intelligent animal via their language of flutelike purrs and whoops. How’d that happen, I wonder? Then we meet Yuri’s mother, Dasha (Emily Watson), who looks like she fell out of that one movie where some of the people in it are actually trolls. She lives in a hobbit cottage where she breeds bats (did she just toss one in the stew, bones and fur and all? Yep) and – get THIS – seems to coexist in the forest peacefully with the Ochi. Is this a movie where kids of multiple species are reunited with their mothers? Sure seems like it.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: That troll movie is Border, and the hobbit movies are, well, you know. But the big reference points here are E.T. and Gremlins, if they had been directed by Wes Anderson circa Fantastic Mr. Fox and Moonrise Kingdom.
Performance Worth Watching: Zengel – impressive in the German Netflix film System Crasher – boasts an intense screen presence that brings to mind Saoirise Ronan or Anya Taylor-Joy. And that might be more prevalent if Ochi gave her a stronger, more thoroughly developed character to play.
Memorable Dialogue: A Yuri and Baby Ochi exchange that’s funnier when left decontextualized:
Yuri (in Ochi language): Booger!
Baby Ochi: Try it!
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Yes, Baby Ochi saying “Try it” was him essentially daring Yuri to eat her freshly excavated nose goblin, and I’m afraid the moment is an unfortunate metaphor for my experience with the movie. To be fari, The Legend of Ochi is a love-it-or-hate-it affair, and some may see its display of gross, sweaty, moist, tousled, smelly-looking, warts-and-all practical visual effects as endearing in their craft and creativity. And so it’s a case of cognitive dissonance, where I can appreciate the artisanal qualities of Saxon’s grubby, handcrafted aesthetic while at the same time finding it a bit repellent. Which is to say, I did not want to taste Saxon’s booger, held out to me on the tip of his finger. So to speak.
And so immersion in this world of vibrant mossy greens and omnipresent mountain mist just wasn’t going to happen, but that doesn’t preclude my desire to see more films forego CGI for emphasis on animatronic puppetry, matte paintings, miniatures and location shoots, all stuff of many a warm-memory movie experience from my 1980s youth, which Saxon likely wants to emulate. But Ochi lacks the warmth of character of E.T. or The Dark Crystal – or perhaps more to the point, the patience to nurture it. It’s as if Saxon employed this aesthetic to will the screenplay and its simplistic themes of coexistence and peaceful understanding into relevance. Rendering Baby Ochi as something more than just a kewt but sharp-toothed fluffster and Yuri as more than a stereotypical sullen teen yearning to defy the ideology of her father might’ve gone a long way toward endearing one to the visual ambition of the world around them.
The film reeks of effort, as every visual inch of it is stymied with 10 inches of style. It’s easy to admire, but just as easy to be distracted by its transparent attempt to defy the norms of modern moviemaking – you know, look ma, we can actually touch this stuff! That applies to the tone as well, which is so obviously conceived to be askew, it ends up making everyone in the film look a little bit silly. Ochi’s sense of wonder seems forced and overwrought, with stabs at comedy that miss the mark by several paces. One image exemplifies the a-bit-much aesthetic perfectly: A closeup of Yuri crying tears that are roughly the size of Indiana Jones boulders, rolling down her flushed cheeks. You can practically see them from space. I ultimately found this movie’s maximalism tiresome.
Our Call: The Legend of Ochi is a booger too far. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.