Director: Isaiah Saxon
Stars: Helena Zengel, Willem Dafoe, Finn Wolfhard
Music video whizz Isaiah Saxon here partners with A24 for the studio’s first concerted foray into family friendly entertainment, in the process delivering what occasionally feels like grooming material for hipster parents who have long grown tired of re-watching the same five Studio Ghibli films over and over again. That’s a snarky, churlish thing to say. But it doesn’t half ring true come the end of the movie when we’re confronted with an idyll ripped right from the pages of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Some have been quick to throw Spielberg out as the pertinent reference of choice, and that’s fair (there’s some definite Amblin Entertainment vibes to all this), but for millennials and younger the more relevant touchstones might be the Japanese animation powerhouse and the adventures of The Mandalorian.
We’re in the shadow of the Carpathian mountains on the cusp of the Black Sea; distant and exotic enough for Saxon to play liberally with local folklore. The locals live in fear of simian menaces the Ochi, a race of monkey-like creatures known for killing livestock and injuring people. Curmudgeonly patriarch Maxim (Willem Dafoe) schools the valley’s kids in how to hunt down these menaces, teaching a bitterly unsentimental worldview with the aid of his dutiful son Petro (Finn Wolfhard). Wayward daughter Yuri (Helena Zengel, from System Crasher!) is less inclined to tow the family line. She has a metal band’s poster on her bedroom wall with the slogan “Destroy the Father” if this wasn’t obvious enough. And lo, when she comes across a young, wounded Ochi, she befriends the creature and sets out on a perilous mission to return it to the wilds.
The Legend of Ochi deals tactfully enough with the growing pangs associated with feeling like an exile in one’s own family (a sense of disenfranchisement that rang several bells in this audience member). Yuri feels cognate to her new foundling. Where the creature is literally separated from it’s kin, she is emotionally disinvested from hers. Naturally, she comes to learn that the creatures have been given a profoundly bad rep – similar to how the Madagascan’s long perceived aye-ayes as demonic – and even learns how to communicate with the little’un’s constant trilling.
The Ochi themselves are a marvel of animatronic effects work, imbued with a soulfulness (those saucer black eyes don’t hurt none), and their presence in the scenes with the actors is infinitely preferable to the dislocation still felt between man and CG efforts. Digital work is absolutely there in the mix from time to time (usually announcing itself), but the tactile relationships created are vital and, at the very least, in keeping with a level of technical prowess that evidences elsewhere.
While the editing of the third act suggests that, to some degree, Saxon didn’t quite get all the coverage he needed, the footage captured by DP Evan Prosofsky and the lighting crew throughout the film is absolutely sublime. The Legend of Ochi is – quite easily – among the much handsomely photographed features of the year, resplendent in it’s honeyed halo glows or shrouded in immaculate, mysterious blacks. Those handsome aerial shots of the craggy landscapes certainly aim for the epic, too.
While it’s generally always pleasing when a film comes in at a tight 100 minutes or less, Ochi might have benefitted from a little embellishment. Just when it feels like it’s hitting a reasonably episodic stride, we’re thrust into the movie’s rather predictable endgame. A speed-run to the credits. Ochi comes to feel like a cliff-noting exercise of a more expansive source; a little ridiculous when it’s an ‘original’ screenplay. Perhaps this is why it seems to have been met with a somewhat muted reception. Saxon has an awful lot going for him here, except perhaps the vision to turn this into something truly awe-inspiring, wowing with skill but not ambition.
That said, I had an awful lot of fun along the way, more-so than that lukewarm reception had me anticipating. With its particular set of references both thematic, tonal and visual, it dances dangerously with feeling like A24-by-numbers (appreciably, tastefully kooky; just the right side of twee). But, in a landscape populated almost exclusively with endless IP extensions and identikit YA adaptations, Saxon’s desire to create an alternative to seed growth in young imaginations is exceedingly welcome.
The Lost Highway Hotel 