“The Legend of Ochi” Fails to Entrance

The Legend of Ochi (Isaiah Saxon, 2025) 2 out of 5 stars

Writer/director Isaiah Saxon makes his feature debut with an ambitious story about humanity’s interaction with the natural world. Sometimes joyous, often fearful, our feelings about the creatures beyond civilization’s doorstep have long been the subject of myth and fantasy. In The Legend of Ochi, Saxon traffics in well-worn storytelling and visual clichés that unfortunately do not offer much that is new. Still, a few moments stand out, rescuing this undercooked affair from complete mediocrity.

Somewhere on (as we are told) the Island of Carpathia in the Black Sea (which looks like the Carpathian Mountains of Central Europe), a group of villagers spend their nights in raids on their local population of “Ochi,” ape-like animals who communicate through song. Or rather, one adult male, Maxim (Willem Dafoe, Poor Things), leads a troop of boys into the woods to hunt these beasts, whom he blames for the loss of his wife. When his daughter, Yuri (Helena Zengel, News of the World), finds a baby Ochi one evening in a trap, instead of killing it she decides to return it to its clan. If she can find them, that is.

Along the way, she’ll overcome many obstacles, including pursuit by Maxim and his surrogate sons (with a wasted Finn Wolfhard, When You Finish Saving the World, among them). Another adult, Dasha (Emily Watson, Small Things Like These), provides conditional assistance, but ultimately, Yuri is on her own. As things go, she bonds with the young Ochi, eventually discovering that she can sing its language. Harmony is very much on the cinematic menu.

The Ochi look like a cross between Gizmo from Gremlins and Grogu (aka “Baby Yoda”) from the Star Wars series The Mandalorian, with possibly a little ET thrown in. The young one is cute. That’s a plus. There’s not much narrative that we haven’t seen in similar films, such as District 9 or How to Train Your Dragon. That’s a minus.

The biggest issue is that the human characters are woefully undeveloped. There’s a major climax at the end where all the plot threads ostensibly come together. Parts of the design of it fascinate, yet the emotional core beneath fails to resonate.

It may seem unfair to criticize a movie made with such starry-eyed hope for the world, yet payoffs mean nothing without adequate setup. I kept on hoping I’d find myself in capable artistic hands, yet as the minutes ticked by, I felt more and more distant from the onscreen shenanigans, despite some genuinely amusing sequences that broke through the dramatic barrier. There’s a lot to look at, but not a lot to see.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.