On a remote island in the Black Sea, a young girl is told to fear the local creatures because they destroyed her family. When she encounters a little one, however, it leads to a journey of exploration and understanding, as well as an unlikely new friendship.
You know stories like this. You’ve watched them plenty of times.
Maybe.
[Spoilers ahead.]
It’s bemusing to see The Legend of Ochi draw so many comparisons to E.T. and other ‘80s kid classics—or any story where a child befriends avatars of the unknown. In actuality, Ochi has more in common with Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople. It is about a misanthropic little gremlin of a kid. It details parent-child dynamics in painful, absurdist detail, and questions what makes a family. And most of the magic (if there truly is any any at all) is in the journey itself, rather the myriad discoveries therein.
Yuri (Helena Zengel) is the child of Maxim (Willem Dafoe), a man who trains young boys from poor farming families to fight the Ochi, a species that their people regularly kill on sight. Maxim is miserable because the Ochi are monsters that destroyed his family—his wife is gone, which means he has no son to call his own and train. He warns his daughter to fear the dark and the monsters that lie in wait.
Except… his wife isn’t dead, she just left. And he has a surrogate son in Petro (Finn Wolfhard), who’s practically his adopted ward. And he leads his “army” of boys with guns in his own very silly, incomplete set of faux-historical armor. And he regularly sends Yuri to check the traps he’s laid about their property, even after dark.
There are plenty of clues throughout this film, clever tricks of worldbuilding, to let its audience know they’re not being told the whole story. Even the narration at the start from Yuri herself: It’s delivered like the opening to a storybook, not a history. Something is being left out. Maybe a lot of things. What those things are, you’ll largely have to suss out for yourself.
But Yuri is done going along with her dad’s version of things. She doesn’t speak loudly or clearly, but she loves to tell people when they are being “stupid” or “dumb.” She has an aquarium full of fluffy blue caterpillars. She has a puffy oversized yellow coat in lieu of her dad’s armor. She has a heavy metal poster on her wall with a huge viking-looking guy and the words DESTROY YOUR FATHER emblazoned at the bottom. She doesn’t look like she’s bathed in a while.
In short, she’s everything I wanted to see in a movie when I was her age.
When Yuri discovers a baby Ochi caught in one of their traps, her instinct is to protect it. She quickly decides that she’ll have to nurse it back to health and bring it home to its family, sneaking out in the middle of the night. As a farm girl who has been surviving on a lack of parental guidance or attention for many years, she’s pretty well-equipped to go off on this sort of survivalist hike. (She does raid a grocery store in the interim and drink milk right out of the carton in the refrigerator aisle.)
Oh, and she does run into her mother Dasha (Emily Watson) again. A woman who is alive and well and curiously sporting one wooden hand. Who seems to know a great deal about Ochi, interestingly enough. Turns out the family dynamics only get more interesting from here.
A few fun trope reversals of the sort of tale Ochi is aping pop up in writer-director Isaiah Saxon’s compact script. For example, rather than the Ochi learning Yuri’s language in bits and pieces, she is shocked when she realizes she can understand and communicate with her friend in its own tongue. (And be honest, isn’t that the real dream in those situations?) The regular world manages to feel just as fantastical as the wilderness Yuri sets out into, the people in it as confusing as wildlife. In a narrowing of scope, there’s no big villain to this story. Only delightfully odd people with their largely invented problems.
The special effects are part of what make this such a spectacular feat. The Legend of Ochi renders its creatures using clever combinations of puppetry, animatronics, and CGI, creating a performance that is miraculously touchable to the eye. I kept whispering to myself “this is future Jim Henson wanted” as the film played—a seamless integration of what’s real and what isn’t to make up a character that outmatches any computer rendering. (Did it help that the baby ochi’s face greatly resembles that of my half-pug puppy? Well, let’s just say it certainly didn’t hurt.)
There are two aspects of this film that stand out amongst similar ventures. The first is that Yuri’s journey is one built on her own bids for connection. She is lonely, much like Bastian of The Neverending Story, but not from grief so much as neglect. She has finally reached a point in her growth where she realizes that her needs are going unmet and that she’s angry about it. Even Petro, who should be more like a brother to her, is pointless in this. “You’re nice when no one’s looking,” she tells him early on, and you know immediately how useful he’ll be going forward.
Yuri’s parents have not been anything of the sort to her, and part of this story is about them learning that they still have to try, even if they’re coming to it too late. The events only moves forward as they should when both of them give Yuri what she asks for, when they truly listen to her.
But the other aspect might be my favorite: This movie is almost entirely about the way that people project their own concepts of morality, temperament, and ethics onto the natural world. Maxim’s armor is decorated with wolves, as he facies himself a predator of solitude with a singular goal. Pointedly, neither he, nor real-life wolves, operate this way: He is surrounded by his army of boys and wolves live in packs. Dasha insists to Yuri that returning the baby ochi to its mother won’t work because it will reject the child for having the “stink of man” on it, just as birds do. But this is a myth that humans like to perpetuate and completely false amongst birds. It’s on Dasha to realize that perhaps she is the one rejecting a child for having the stink of man… or one man in particular.
The ochi themselves are the final piece to this puzzle, a species of untold brutality according to the start of this story, who proceed to do nothing that lives up to such an image. As always, it’s humans using animals as justifications for their behavior and beliefs, and expecting everyone to go along with the tale they’ve constructed to everyone’s detriment.
If you’re worried about traumatizing the children in your life (or yourself) with Bambi-style grief, rest assured that nothing resembling that lies in wait. The Legend of Ochi would never be so predictable or boring as that. Instead, it’s a genuine little fable about the implacable will of one girl who deserves the world… and will find it for herself if no one’s planning to help.