Somewhat unfairly, A24 Films has gained a reputation for making soul-scarring horror movies, so it’s a point of intrigue when that same studio announces that it’s putting out a fantasy movie for families. The Legend of Ochi does look and sound every bit as weird as you would hope from an A24 film. It’s just a shame about the rest.
The plot is basically How to Train Your Dragon minus a great deal of connective tissue. It takes place on an island in the Black Sea, where humans hunt the ochi, a race of orange-furred primates with fangs. The people’s leader (Willem Dafoe) has lied to the people that the ochi are dangerous predators that killed his wife (Emily Watson), but his 13-year-old daughter Yuri (Helena Zengel) knows the truth: The ochi are harmless if they’re left alone, and her mother is still out there, trying to communicate with them. When Yuri finds a baby ochi whose leg has been caught in a trap, she resolves to return it to the caves where its fellow ochi live.
Isaiah Saxon is a first-time director with a background in animation and music videos. (His much-feted video for Björk’s “Wanderlust” gives you an idea of his visual style.) He seems anxious to skip over the boring story stuff like the process of nurturing a wounded animal back to health — Yuri wraps a bandage around the baby’s leg, and it’s cured. This movie does improve on How to Train Your Dragon in one important respect, in that the ochi are actually dangerous to humans — when the baby gets scared and bites Yuri’s arm, her arm turns blue and develops pustules, and only her mother is able to save the limb.
Other than that, Finn Wolfhard shows up as an orphan being raised by Yuri’s father, and beyond informing the man that Yuri is traveling alone with an ochi, I’m not sure what his character does. Yuri’s reunion with her mother comes out as flat as the rest of the story, and Yuri herself seems to change little on account of her perilous journey, so that Zengel (maybe you remember her playing the German girl that Tom Hanks was transporting in News of the World) doesn’t have much to play.
It’s the edges of the film that convince us that we’re in a fantasy world. Cinematographer Evan Prosofsky films the wilderness (the movie was shot in Romania) in unreal-looking orange and green tones, and the steep and thickly forested Apuseni Mountains studded with lakes make a better backdrop for the action than any studio could. David Longstreth’s appropriately strange musical score gives prominence to ocarinas and panpipes playing in eerie octaves. That’s supplemented by a lot of Romanian pop and Macedonian death metal music, which people are playing on their CD players even though much of the decor is medieval. And of course, it’s impossible to fault the creature effects that bring the baby ochi to life. Saxon’s got the technical tools he needs to make good movies, but he needs the storytelling skills to go with them.
The Legend of Ochi
SStarring Helena Zengel and Willem Dafoe. Written and directed by Isaiah Saxon. Rated PG.
