The Ochi are a mythical forest species that communicates in sensations rather than words (and also through hocketing, a vocal technique that involves splitting a single melody across two different sounds). By contrast, Isaiah Saxon’s “The Legend of Ochi” is a somewhat inert but ingeniously crafted fantasy adventure story that mostly communicates in visuals.
Visuals like: A teenage girl traipsing across the Carpathian mountains with a small woodland creature — imagine if Willem Dafoe and a snub-nosed golden monkey were fused together in a vat of blue eyeshadow — riding in her backpack. Like the actual Willem Dafoe clad in a suit of World War I armor as he leads a squadron of peashooter-packing children to chase the girl down. Like Emily Watson driving a pick-up truck with a wooden hand and blasting Italian rock music as one of the most beautiful matte paintings this side of “The Black Narcissus” stretches out into the landscape around her. “The Legend of Ochi” may not have a lot to say (especially not in any form of spoken language), but it sure offers plenty of things to see.
Almost real enough to seem remembered, 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 made for Björk’s 2007 banger “Wanderlust” almost seems like a proof-of-concept for the world the Ochi would ultimately inhabit (Watson’s performance is Björk-coded in a way that feels like a knowing tribute). That world — a fictional island that feels like a little pocket universe located in the overlap between 1992 and “The NeverEnding Story” — might seem like a pretty normal place to grow up if not for the threat posed by the mysterious Ochi, who live in the shadows and supposedly feast on the livestock at night.
But the danger extends to humans as well. Yuri (Helena Zengel) has been raised to believe that the Ochi destroyed her family. Her lovingly militaristic father Maxim (Dafoe, in full Eggers mode) blames the beasts for taking away his wife and depriving him the dream of a son — hence the rabble of lost boys he assembles to hunt the Ochi every night, a group led by a twiggy orphan named Petro (Finn Wolfhard) who Maxim treats as his own.
But Yuri is disenfranchised from her girl dad 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 forest one night, it’s immediately clear that the big-eyed puppet understands her in a way that no human ever has. (That the baby Ochi looks just like Yuri’s father isn’t relevant to the plot, and it may not even be on purpose, but it still adds a much-needed layer of Freudian dream logic to a film whose story is often too straightforward for its own good.) Like the baby Ochi, Yuri has been isolated from the only family she’s ever known. Perhaps by taking the critter back to its lair at the heart of the island, the girl will be able to reconcile the comforts of home with the call of the wild.
“The Legend of Ochi” too loosely coheres around the cognitive dissonance of feeling like you don’t belong in your own family, as Yuri and Maxim — a pair of pointedly inexpressive characters at the center of a hyper-evocative world — remain much less detailed than the environment Saxon has created around them. And yet, both lived-in and unnatural all at once, the island of Carpathia itself so vividly conveys Yuri’s crisis 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 she leaves for her dad before running away reads: “I am 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 between emotional fact and environmental fantasy, and his debut feature is such an uncanny blend of the real and the unreal that its trailer fooled some trigger-happy dorks into assuming it must have been created with AI (a suspicion the movie itself immediately dispels, as every one of its images — every crinkle of an Ochi’s nose, every green inch of breathing moss underfoot — breathes with too much vitality of its own to feel like a soulless imitation of life). That knee jerk reaction seems all the more ironic and embarrassing in hindsight, as “The Legend of Ochi” is nothing if not a story about — and an example of — the bespoke power of personal expression in a world so eager to subsume entire languages, visual and otherwise, into the stuff of crude prompts.
It may not be anything more than that, either. For all of the film’s sensorial richness (which extends to the brilliance of its puppetry, the airy Carpathian luster of David Longstreth’s score, and the semi-nostalgic splendor of the Skull Island-like cave system the Ochi call home, which feels as much like a throwback to ’80s fantasy as it does completely lost in time), “The Legend of Ochi” struggles for a reason to be told. Sensations abound, but a human audience might struggle to access the same emotionality the Ochi are supposedly able to mine from them.
The film skips from one semi-charming affectation 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 like costumes. For a story that takes place in such a tactile and cohesive fantasy world, it’s frustrating that the archness of its telling keeps the viewer at a distance rather than pulling them closer to the heart of the matter. As a result, the stakes at play rarely feel worthy of the same imagination that makes them so clear, and the movie goes slack in a way it can never fully recover from when it slows down to explain itself during the second act. Carpathia is a strange and enchanted place that I’m thrilled to have visited, but I hope the next world Saxon creates allows us to feel the land a little more deeply while we’re there, and gives us a little more to take back home with us when we leave.
Grade: C+
“The Legend of Ochi” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. A24 will release it in theaters on Friday, April 25.
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