'The Legend of Ochi’ Review: A Children’s Film with Zero Imagination
While no one can deny the intricate puppetry of The Legend of Ochi, Isaiah Saxon’s directorial debut is a frequently grating, listless carbon copy of better, more poignant family adventures, without any personal voice behind the images that the director unabashedly steals from.
From its opening shot, Isaiah Saxon’s The Legend of Ochi seems to evoke the wonder and thrills of children’s entertainment from the past, and with good reason. Most films catered for a small audience nowadays are frequently juvenile and display none of the creativity and eye-widening excitement that titles like The Goonies, E.T. The Extraterrestrial, and, in recent memory, Where the Wild Things Are represented for moviegoers. In many respects, Saxon, in his feature directorial debut, wants to pay tribute to the films he grew up watching through the relationship formed between its human and otherworldly figure, a mélange of sorts of E.T. and Gremlins, inside a larger-than-life, textured adventure in the vein of Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are.
Yet, there’s a fine line between tribute, pastiche, and imitation that Saxon unfortunately does not draw. Instead, he prefers to copy and paste his inspirations into a grab-bag movie with zero authorial identity and the imagination required to instill some form of fun in this profoundly inert and, quite frankly, irritating journey. The opening scene – a chase for a mysterious creature named the ‘Ochi’ set at night – is the opening scene of E.T., replete with a bludgeoning score from David Longstreth that immediately recalls John Williams’ work. A quick note about the music: the movie has no confidence in the audience’s intelligence that they will naturally feel for Yuri (Helena Zengel), the film’s protagonist, and her connection with an Ochi, that the score immediately tells us which emotions we should perceive a scene in and is always present, at all times, placating emotions artificially within each sequence. It always tells us how to feel at any given moment, never allowing us to feel these emotions on our own.
Yuri has been taught to fear the Ochi, a dangerous and reclusive creature, known as a hungry killing machine which must be exterminated. That’s what her father, Maxim (Willem Dafoe), believes and teaches a group of children and teenagers to trap it and kill it on sight, creating an almost cult-like environment between himself and the children, devoted to exterminate all Ochis. The smaller details, such as kids cleaning their guns, or smelling an Ochi’s fur, give a form of subtext that’s ripe to be explored: how Maxim fearing a completely innocuous creature has corrupted the young minds of the small island of Carpathia, and nothing is done to rewire their mindsets on the innocence of the Ochi.
Yet, Saxon is so disinterested in the half-baked mythology of the Ochi, an original character that’s essentially an amalgamation of E.T. and a Mogwai, that he never develops anything to its fullest extent. When Yuri rescues an injured Ochi from one of her father’s traps, one thinks the movie will focus on building a compelling relationship with the two, like Elliot and E.T., the most significant reference the film keeps making. Unfortunately, Saxon is also disinterested in the core aspect that will make The Legend of Ochi stand out as a singular effort in the “family adventure” compendium. No symbiosis occurs between the two, and we never know the fundamental questions that should be asked when making a movie like this: What compels Yuri to suddenly have a change of heart and bring the Ochi back home, after being taught by her father that all of them are evil, and the reason why his wife (played by Emily Watson) left him? What suddenly clicked in her to do the right thing? Who knows, because we go straight into an adventure that will test your patience in more infuriating ways than one.
There’s nothing I detested more watching a film on the big screen this year than witnessing a conversation between two characters entirely told through shrill noises so overbearing it immediately lost the dramatic potency that could’ve been crafted had it perhaps sounded different or wasn’t as loud as it was. The patient unspoken conversations that Yuri could have with the Ochi, creating moments of pure cinema that act as a tangible emotional connection, is nowhere to be found when the two characters speak to each other through the Ochi’s guttural sound so unpleasant to listen to I almost contemplated leaving the cinema. After being bit by the Ochi in a setpiece that involves nothing but overbearing screams and in-your-face camerawork, Yuri begins to understand its language. That should’ve theoretically been a cool idea, but it gets completely brushed over when Yuri’s mother reveals why she understands the language, ignoring the development that a story like this could’ve made.
The movie has no respect for its audience, carving out a plot entirely based on other titles without ever appropriating these familiar feelings in a distinct voice from its creator. Even the ingenious puppetry of its Ochi creatures, done without an ounce of CGI (or artificial intelligence), becomes unimpressive when Saxon’s visual language clashes with too many ideas. Does it want to be a throwback to 80s adventure films, filled with the artifice of miniatures, matte paintings, expressive lighting, or an ‘elevated’ picture in the vein of Robert Eggers? You can’t be both at the same time, because these stylistic flourishes will undoubtedly come to a head. They do, resulting in an often discombobulating, and, sadly, uninteresting picture to look at, despite the obvious care that went into the production.
The sad thing about The Legend of Ochi’s purposeful artificiality is that it’s more of a bug than a feature. We notice the small cracks in its aesthetic instead of soaking in the bigger picture and enveloping us in a world that feels slightly removed from reality but still rooted in an era perpetually stuck in time. The good ideas are there, but the film never explores them to its fullest effect. It would rather remind people of the films they liked than find its own identity amidst the bevy of family titles it unabashedly rips off from. There’s a difference between what’s should be considered a “love letter” and a “cheap imitation,” and, sadly, there isn’t a single “original” idea in Saxon’s film that doesn’t feel like it was stolen from someone else.
And this is only felt because the director never gives us a compelling reason to care about the Ochi, and its relationship with Yuri. It’s all incredibly surface level, treading on elements that have been treated countless times before in infinitely better titles, and actively gave a damn about the unconventional friendship formed by the human and its alien creature.
Zengel is a talented actress, as illustrated in Paul Greengrass’ News of the World, but she’s given virtually nothing to do and work on, ultimately failing a character that needed to be far more interesting on paper than how she was written. The same can be said for both Dafoe and Watson, who, despite their best efforts, deliver two of the worst performances of their career, portraying antagonistic figures to Yuri whose paths are so telegraphed you’ll be able to guess easily how Maxim will have a change of heart and realize that the Ochi are, in fact, the most innocent of all creatures.
When The Legend of Ochi ultimately wrapped up, what did this pastiche mean. In a similar project, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s incredible Freaky Tales, recently received accolades and that anthology film was nothing but a pastiche of different formal approaches to genre cinema that constantly pulled from the directing duo’s favorite movies. However, the difference between Boden and Fleck’s approach to pastiche and Saxon’s is simple: they proudly wore their cinematic influences on their sleeves and found their own voice within them.
Saxon never does this. He wants to remind you how great the films of your past were without adding his own touch to his inspirations. This quickly results in a vacuous effort devoid of any personality, emotion, and imagination, despite the obvious craft that went into the production. The imagination is there, but the insecurity in the images is far too present for me to wrap myself up in an original film without a single original frame – or idea – in it, and a grating central figure whose sound made my nerves explode. Saxon may eventually find his own voice as he makes more feature-length films, but the time is sadly not today.