THE LEGEND OF OCHI - Mark Reviews Movies

The Legend of Ochi, A24

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 24, 2025

There's a genuine sense of magic in the creatures of The Legend of Ochi. They're easy enough to describe, looking like a cross between a monkey and a cat, with reddish fur and bright blue faces featuring pools of big, dark eyes. It's as if director Isaiah Saxon and the team of designers set out to make as cute a creature as possible. In that, they've succeeded, but the real magic of the movie is in how these mythical animals, especially the little one that drives the story, have been brought to life.

It's all, apparently, puppetry, accomplished right on set and in-camera. We believe no digital trickery was involved in making these creatures move, because Saxon stages the animals' actions in such a way that we can imagine where the puppeteers would have to be located just outside of frame or how there might have been multiple puppets used for individual parts of a single character. Even so, the movie still fools us in many ways, because the motions are so smooth and the main creature's visage is so expressive that we have to marvel at the thought of how many parts must make up that face.

It'd be easy to talk and speculate about the ochi, those primate-like animals, and the techniques Saxon and his crew have employed to make them feel real for much longer. Indeed, it's tempting to do so, not only because the animals are so intriguing and the technical side of their creation is so convincing, but also because the movie beyond them feels mostly like an excuse to showcase the filmmakers' devotion to practical effects. The human story and characters exist here as if they don't really matter.

In a way, they don't, of course, but if that is the case, Saxon's screenplay errs in framing the narrative from the humans' perspective. They're so hollow and bland that the script seems to attempt to make up for that by making a couple of them broadly eccentric. Just a hint of seeing the ochi in their element makes us want to witness more of and learn more about them, but having the entire story revolve around these human characters only makes us want more of those creatures, too.

The setting is a fictional island in the Black Sea, which has thrived for many generations under the population's farming way of life. The biggest threats are the ochi, which have been depicted in books and spoken of in local folklore as ravenous beasts that attack livestock and humans alike (The movie never actually clarifies if any of these tales are true, fiction, or some combination of fact and myth). Our protagonist is Yuri (Helena Zengel), the daughter of Maxim (Willem Dafoe). He has established a hunting party of kids and teens whose only task is to find and kill as many ochi as they can, lest the creatures cause more damage than the locals can handle.

Before we meet any of them, though, the movie gives us a brief idea of the ochi as rather social creatures, organizing a gathering of sorts, communicating by way of musical screeches and coos, and, finally, warning each other when the hunters arrive at this part of the forest. The suggested intricacy of their behavior mirrors the obvious intricacy of the filmmakers' efforts to bring the creatures to life, as they scramble through, climb up, and leap across trees to hide from and escape the humans' rifles.

The real story begins when Yuri, sent to check traps by her strict father, discovers a young ochi caught in one of those snares. She frees the animal and brings it home, and after realizing this ochi isn't the violent menace she has read and heard about her entire life (There's a lovely moment involving a caterpillar, which the little ochi cares for instead of eating), Yuri decides to make the trek to return the baby to its family.

It's an old-fashioned adventure yarn, basically, that's involving for its beautiful backdrops (some of them real, a good number of them convincing sets or paintings that look as if they've been incorporated into shots using old-fashioned in-camera trickery) and the bond that develops between Yuri and the creature. Every time the movie returns to Maxim—leading his crew of boys (including Finn Wolfhard's orphaned Petro, whom he sees like a son) to find Yuri after he thinks she has been abducted by the ochi—or attempts to incorporate Emily Watson's enigmatic shepherd Dasha (whose connection to Yuri and Maxim isn't difficult to guess), the momentum and sense of wonder comes to a halt. That Maxim dresses in golden armor and Dasha has a wooden hand doesn't compensate for how tedious the characters are, existing here for the plot or to state some information about the ochi.

This is still an impressive feat of using practical effects to make mystical creatures and a fanciful world into something tangible, and despite the screenplay's dalliances away from those creatures and its muddled mythology, the climax here is surprisingly moving. How much of that, though, is on account of the fact that it's the most we see of the eponymous animals of The Legend of Ochi since the story's start? They're the obvious stars of this tale, and if Saxon trusted that more, the movie might have been on to something.

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