We Have Good News and Bad News About The Legend of Ochi

When the trailer for A24’s The Legend of Ochi first premiered, some social media wags surmised (absurdly) that the film had been generated by artificial intelligence, thus stirring up a bizarre online brouhaha. The glimpses of its imaginary universe were maybe a little too clean, a little too bathed in that shiny nostalgic glow that we now associate with A.I.-slop, to feel like they could have existed in physical space. This odd controversy reached such a point that the movie’s writer-director, Isaiah Saxon, felt compelled to respond. It turned out that the opposite was true: The effects were largely the result of painstakingly executed puppetry and animatronics, the settings often a combination of Romanian locations and matte paintings, all overseen by the obsessive Saxon, a music video director who’d spent years working on this, his first feature. Watching the film itself (which just premiered at Sundance, ahead of an April 25 theatrical release), we can sense the level of detail and sensitivity that has gone into imagining this largely handmade world and the strange furry creatures at its center. The Legend of Ochi looks magnificently real. It’s a fantasy that makes it hard to believe that it’s a fantasy.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the same level of attention and care does not appear to have been extended to the story or the characters, which is lethal for something that’s supposed to be a modern-day fable. The cursory plot feels like it’s been assembled from generic pieces of other fairy tales and myths. Yuri (Helena Zengel), a girl born to a father (Willem Dafoe) who wanted a boy, finds herself escaping with a cuddly baby Ochi, a fictional primate species her island community is at war with. The determined, demented father, armed like a ragtag knight, gathers the young men of the village in an attempt to do battle with these so-called “goblins.” Chased by her dad and his minions, Yuri attempts to locate her mother (Emily Watson) and then tries to lead her ward safely to the fantastical land of the Ochi. There’s no real shape to their journey, no unexpected pitfalls or subplots or surprises; even a rambunctious interlude in a modern-day supermarket feels curiously predetermined. The baby Ochi, looking for all the world like it’s getting ready to audition for a Gremlins reboot, evokes memories of magical ’80s family classics. But at their best, those movies had wild, unforgettable stories. Their concepts were simple, but they sent us on rollercoaster rides of anticipation, terror, and heartbreak. There’s a reason people still watch those films, and it’s not really because the effects were great.

By contrast, Saxon’s ideas of character seem too rarefied for what should be a simple, evocative and visceral tale. The father, lost in his loveless gloom and living in a world of hard, martial surfaces, spends his time listening to brooding Russian chants. The mother, whose home seems nurturing and filled with plants, listens to Italian pop songs. If we catch these contrasts, they will presumably inform these characters’ psychologies and maybe even fill in the details of why they couldn’t live together, and why the quiet, conflicted Yuri is the way she is. But this sort of shading only really works if there’s already some weight to the characters. Here, they remain paper thin, empty avatars waiting for someone (a screenwriter, a director, an actor, somebody) to fill them with life.

Similarly, we’re told that this island has been struggling with modernity, experiencing an existential crisis because its age-old traditions and seemingly unchanging ways are being encroached upon by technology and outsiders. It’s a promising idea straight out of a sociology textbook, and director Saxon finds some nice images to demonstrate this collision of attitudes. But again, they remain images and ideas — a context waiting for a text. For all the visual vividness, we have very little actual sense of this land, or the people who live there. Yes, The Legend of Ochi looks amazingly, impressively real, but it’s populated by non-characters pursuing a nothing story.