A24’s family fantasy Legend of Ochi has a frustrating family problem

^{The Legend of Ochi premiered on the 2025 Sundance Movie Pageant. This preliminary assessment was timed for its world premiere embargo.}

A toddler befriending a creature everybody else thinks is simply too harmful to befriend is the spine of many memorable coming-of-age tales, from Free Willy and The Black Stallion to E.T. and How you can Practice Your Dragon. It’s the final word fantasy for younger folks: simply getting a wierd, misunderstood, distinctive creature in a method nobody else can.

A24’s almost-fantasy-adventure, almost-family-drama film The Legend of Ochi, from writer-director Isaiah Saxon, follows in that vein. The creature in query is an ochi, an apelike animal distinctive to the movie and native to the Carpathian Mountains of Jap Europe. And the kid is Yuri (Helena Zengel), a lonely teenage woman who’s nonetheless coping with the aftermath of a household tragedy.

Whereas some moments of the film spark the identical magic and sense of connection because the basic films on this very particular film subgenre, the household drama and the creature plotline by no means fairly click on collectively. Whereas these parts typically go collectively like Hiccup and Toothless, they find yourself undermining one another in The Legend of Ochi.

[Ed. note: This post contains setup spoilers for The Legend of Ochi.]

The Legend of Ochi takes place in a distant Carpathian village, the place the ochi, legendary creatures that look a bit like yeti-ape hybrids with sharp tooth, roam the mountains and forest. Yuri feels remoted from her father, Maxim (Willem Dafoe), who’s made it his mission to recruit the younger males of the village in hopes of driving the ochi out. Maxim blames the ochi for his failed marriage, as a result of his spouse left him after they misplaced their son to ochi assaults.

Yuri butts heads with each Maxim and Petro (Stranger Issues’ Finn Wolfhard), an orphan Maxim took in and is elevating to be a seasoned ochi hunter. After Yuri finds a child ochi, she decides to run away and return the creature to its house within the woods. She bonds with the creature — and likewise comes face-to-face along with her mom (Emily Watson), who now lives alone in an remoted cabin and research the ochi, very like Hiccup’s misplaced mom, Valka, in How you can Practice Your Dragon 2.

The connection between Yuri and the child ochi is the strongest thread of the film. The creature is cute, and Saxon’s use of puppetry to deliver it to life makes their interactions extra tactile and plausible. It’s charming when the ochi communicates in little murmurs and growls, and much more so when Yuri begins to grasp what these sounds imply. Zengel does a fantastic job of appearing towards the puppet, and actually sells Yuri’s nearly bullheaded conviction that she can bond with this creature and march safely into ochi territory to take it house, even when her mom warns her that it could possible imply the child’s loss of life, as a result of the grownup ochi will reject it.

Whereas Yuri and the ochi are fascinating, Saxon doesn’t spend practically sufficient time with them. Nor does he spend sufficient time on the messy household dynamics that encourage Yuri to run away within the first place. That latter lack finally ends up undermining the film probably the most. Yuri’s household has supposedly been damaged aside by the ochi, however viewers don’t get a lot sense of what their household was like earlier than the assault, and their present motives really feel unclear and contradictory.

When a household film splits up the household for a lot of the run time, it’s vital to ensure the viewers nonetheless understands who these characters are and what they imply to one another. However Saxon doesn’t take time to determine them as folks earlier than sending Yuri off on her journey, and the remainder of the film solely has a couple of interactions between them.

Nonetheless, the actors pull off a couple of small, touching moments fairly nicely when they’re collectively. Yuri’s mother gently braids her hair whereas Yuri rests after getting damage. A late dialog between Yuri and Maxim is a beautiful throwback to their first interplay, one which feels real, as father and daughter attempt to relate to one another within the film’s endgame. However there aren’t sufficient of those moments to essentially promote the household story.

Provided that Saxon doesn’t spend sufficient time both with Yuri and the ochi or with Yuri and her household, the film’s two greatest emotional arcs by no means absolutely come collectively. The ending, which is meant to deliver them collectively in an enormous cathartic second, doesn’t really feel earned. There’s a slight twinge of reduction, nevertheless it’s instantly muddled by a way of Wait — how did this even occur? as a result of there isn’t sufficient significant buildup. All of the threads are there, they usually’re even looped out and in of one another. However they’re by no means pulled tight or tied collectively sufficient to carry the story collectively.

The Legend of Ochi hits theaters on April 25.