A24’s newest release, The Legend of Ochi, had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this January, after the film’s theatrical release was pushed back due to the loss of director Isaiah Saxon’s home during the Southern California wildfires earlier this year. It then had a limited release on April 18th, before a wide release on April 25th in the United States. Here in Brazil, it hits theaters on May 29th.
The film follows Yuri, played by Helena Zengel, a young farm girl living in a secluded northern village on the island of Carpathia. Her people are taught not to venture after dark and to fear the reclusive creatures known as the Ochi. When a lost and injured baby Ochi is found, she embarks on a journey of a lifetime in order to return it to its family.
The German actress is a promising young talent, and had her international film debut alongside Tom Hanks in Netflix’s News of the World.
Influences from past blockbusters
Director and writer Isaiah Saxon makes his feature film debut with the picture, shot in regions of Transylvania, such as the Apuseni Mountains. The principal photography started in Romania during November 2021, and was continued at the Castel Film Studios until December of that year. He tells Variety he drew inspiration from nostalgic fantasy films of the 1980’s and 90’s:
“Our film is about a relationship between a kid and another species and how that can be a transformational event in life. The movies that inspired our approach to this were Kes and Black Stallion – for that feeling of a realistic, grounded emotional connection – and then, of course, E.T. and Totoro for the more dreamlike sense of a creature as the mirror of a child’s unconscious inner world. For the stage work and matte paintings, we looked a lot at Willow, Kwaidan, Ugetsu and Black Narcissus, which all embrace theatrical artifice in a really elegante way.”
Saxon says he aimed particularly at the 1990’s dark fantasy film The Witches: “For the sort of unhinged wide-angle madcap tone that weaves its way through the film, Roald Dahl’s The Witches (Nicolas Roeg’s version) was a huge touch point. Princess Mononoke was a primary guiding light for its respect for the intrinsic value of nature irrespective of a human-centered lens.”
The film avoids the excessive use of CGI, highlighting the value of puppetry and animatronics, but not without fully dismissing the use of computerized animation and matte paintings. The titular creature, a monkey-like blue-faced being with bright colors and high-pitched vocalizations, was a puppet operated by 7 performers.
Discovery dwells at home
Putting in perspective the famous dilemma of “humans coexisting with nature”, a Los Angeles Times article uses The Legend of Ochi as an example of how Californians are trying to reach this so-called coexistence, given the recent events happening in the state. The film’s writer and director, raised in Aptos, CA, shares how watching the picture makes it easy to link with issues the Californians are facing nowadays.
Speaking to The Times, Saxon said California’s wildfire anxieties weren’t consciously on his mind when he created the film, but parallels between the imaginary world of his work and his home started emerging during the interview.
Growing up in the redwood forests of Santa Cruz County, he recalled a “constant fear of mountain lions” in the community he was raised. There were also fervent beliefs in the Sasquatch and a museum in Santa Cruz dedicated to the hirsute, mythical creature.
The 42-year-old recalls being told that “if I wandered off into the woods, far enough away from our house, then Sasquatch or mountain lions, or, you know, real adventure and a real kind of sense of magic [awaited] in the forest. So I think that was somehow deep in me when I was coming up with this story.”
How The Legend of Ochi resonates with our relationship with nature
The film also brings familiar faces to the screen playing key roles in the story. Willem Dafoe is Yuri’s father, Maxim, the village patriarch who leads a group of boys, headed by the eldest, Petro (Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard), to hunt down the Ochi. Emily Watson plays Yuri’s estranged mother, Dasha.
While the Dafoe’s character sees humans as apex beings with a right to control the environment, Watson’s has dedicated ample time to study the Ochi – but, according to Isaiah Saxon, accepts that nature can sometimes be beyond the grasp of human conception.
Maxim’s eagerness to have control of his surroundings and his attitudes towards it can relate to Saxon’s childhood memories. He’d visit his best friend’s family at a nearby property, where he’d see them shooting blue jays for sport. Then he’d return to his home of vegetarians.
Shortly before moving to the foothills community in Los Angeles County about two and a half years ago, Saxon heard that some of his would-be neighbors had illegally shot a mountain lion accused of slaughtering animals in the neighborhood.
In the film, an opening montage includes a similar scene, in which a bloodied sheep is ostensibly mauled by an Ochi. In another part, Maxim reminds the young boys he’s been raising into skilled hunters what they’re fighting for: their families have lost geese, cats, livestock, and their sense of safety.
Saxon said he understands the impulse to violently retaliate against an animal that’s caused damage, but ultimately stands against it. The goal of the film, according to him, is not just to advocate for not killing wild animals that live near humans, “it’s ‘we would be better off if we learned from them’”.
Whisper-voiced Yuri acts as an audience avatar, not yet solidified in her values, but figuring them out on her own. “My hope with the film is that kids can enter in as curiously and open-mindedly as Yuri is in the film, and make up their own minds and not let adults stand in the way of what they think is right and true” he finishes.
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The article above was edited by Juliana Sanches.
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