Ochi is a mythical forest species that communicates in sensations rather than words (and also through hocketing, a vocal technique that involves splitting a single melody over two different sounds). In contrast, Isaiah Saxons “The Legend of Ochi“Is a somewhat inert but ingeniously designed fantasy adventure story that mostly communicates in images.
Visuals like: A teenage girl traipsing across the Carpathians with a small forest creature—imagine Willem Dafoe and a snooty-nosed golden monkey fused into a VAT of blue eyeshadow—riding in the backpack. Like them actual Willem Dafoe dressed in a suit of World War I armor as he leads a squadron of letter packing children to chase the girl down. Like Emily Watson driving a pick-up truck with a wooden hand blasting Italian rock music like one of the most beautiful carpet paintings This page of “The Black Narcissus” stretching out into the landscape around her. “The Legend of Ochi” may not have much to say (especially not in any kind of spoken language), but it sure offers a lot of things to see.
Almost real enough to seem memorable, these hand-crafted images straddle the line between ancient worlds and modern techniques with a charm that will be instantly familiar to Saxon’s music video work with his film Animation studio Encyclopedia Pictura; The rustic and ravishing piece they did for Björk’s 2007 Banger “Wanderlust“Almost seems like a proof-of-concept for the world Ochi would ultimately inhabit (Watson’s performance is birch-encoded in a way that feels like a knowledge of homage). That world – a fictional island that feels like a small pocket universe that lies in the overlap between 1992 and “The Neverending Story” – Might seem like a fairly normal place to grow up if not for the threat of the mysterious Ochi, who lives in the shadows and presumably feasts on the livestock at night.
But the danger also extends to humans. Yuri (Helena Zengel) has been brought up to believe that Ochi destroyed her family. Her lovingly militaristic father Maxim (Dafoe, in full Eggers mode) blames the animals for taking his wife away and robbing him of the dream of a son—hence the rabble of lost boys he gathers to hunt Ochi nightly, a group led of a Twiggy Orphan named Petro (Finn Wolfhard) whom Maxim treats as his own.
But Yuri is freed from her girl’s father and his Ahab-like obsession with the creatures he blames for “taking her mother away from them,” and when she finds a wounded baby Ochi in the woods one night, it’s immediately clear that big-Eyed The puppet understands her in a way no human ever has. (That the baby Ochi looks exactly like Yuri’s father isn’t relevant to the plot, and it might not even be intentional, but it still adds a much-needed layer of Freudian Dream Logic to a film whose story is often too simple for its own good. ) Like Baby Ochi, Yuri has been isolated from the only family she has ever known. Perhaps by taking the chalk back to its mud in the heart of the island, the girl will be able to reconcile the comforts of home with the Wild of the Wild.
“The Legend of Ochi” also loosely weaves around the cognitive dissonance of feeling like you don’t belong in your own family, as Yuri and Maxim—a pair of distinctly inexpressive characters at the center of a hyper-evocative world—remain much less detailed than the environment Sakon has created around them. And yet, both lived-in and unnatural at once, the island of Carpathia itself conveys Yuri’s crisis so vividly that her need for belonging feels like it’s always on the tip of her tongue, even if words are never more than a primitive instrument ( The note that she leaves to her father before running away reads: “I’m strong and cool and I don’t care what you think.”).
Saxon’s most consistent strength as an artist is his ability to create fully immersive spaces at the intersection of emotional fact and environmental fantasy, and his debut feature is such a nasty mix of the real and the unreal that its trailer tricked some trigger-happy dorks into provided it must have been created with AI (A suspicion the film itself immediately dispels, as all its images – every wrinkle of an Ochi’s nose, every green inch of breathing moss underfoot – breathe with too much vitality itself to feel like a soulless imitation of life). That knee-jerk reaction seems all the more ironic and embarrassing in retrospect, because “The Legend of Ochi” is nothing if not a story about—and an example of—the tailored power of personal expression in a world so eager to subjugate the whole language, visual and otherwise, in things of raw instructions.
It may not be anything more than that either. For all the film’s sensory richness (which extends to the brilliance of its puppetry, the airy Carpathian brilliance of David Longstreth’s score, and the semi-nostalgic splendor of the Skull Island-like cave system The Ochi calls home, it feels as much like a throw to 80s fantasy as it is completely lost in time), “The Legend of Ochi” struggles for a reason to be heard. Sensations abound, but a human audience might struggle to access the same emotionality that Ochi can presumably wrest from them.
The film skips one half-hearted influence to the next (Dafoe telling his child soldiers to “remember every word like it was the last drop of your mother’s milk,” Yuri’s affection for a black metal band called Hell Throne, and so on), but Saxon’s characters tend to wear these eccentricities as costumes. For a story that takes place in such a tactile and cohesive fantasy world, it’s frustrating that the archness of its narrative keeps the viewer at a distance rather than drawing them closer to the heart. As a result, the stakes in the game rarely feel worthy of the same imagination that makes them so clear, and the film slacks off in a way it can never quite recover from as it slows down to explain itself in the second act. Carpathia is a strange and enchanted place that I am proud to have visited, but I hope that the next World Saxon creates allows us to know the land a little more deeply while we are there and gives us a little more to take back home with us when we leaves.
Grade: C+
“The Legend of Ochi” premiered in 2025 Sundance Film festival. A24 releases it in theaters Friday, April 25.
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