Not that long ago, that Minecraft movie made, like, a bazillion dollars for some reason. Sure, it had Jack Black being his usual excited self, a well-established IP, and cutting-edge CGI, but it was just kinda meh for me. But maybe someone else might have something that could be, like, the anti-Minecraft. Wait, A24 has a new movie that looks like it could be family-friendly, and it has an animatronic puppet as one of the main characters: The Legend of Ochi,
Besides, if my Minecraft viewing was surprisingly packed, my Legend of Ochi viewing was just me. That’s another anti-Minecraft thing.
Yuri (Helena Zengel) is a young girl on the island of Carpathia. On Carpathia, the locals fear the mysterious Ochi, orange-furred primates of some kind, and Yuri’s deeply religious father Maxim (Willem Dafoe) not only hunts the things but is training a batch of kids to hunt them as well. Maxim says his best success is a boy he has more or less adopted, Petro (Finn Wolfhard), an important thing for Maxim since he claims his wife Dasha (Emily Watson) was taken by the Ochi without giving him a son. The truth is more complicated than that, but the bottom line is Yuri is more of a nature-lover, and she doesn’t seem to truck much with whatever her father is doing.
However, Maxim’s latest hunt had a side-effect: an baby Ochi was separated from the rest of its pack, and Yuri finds it injured. Enticing it into her backpack and then patching it up at home, Yuri decides to return the baby Ochi to its mother. Caught by Petro, he opts to look the other way, but the excitable Maxim thinks the Ochi fur and blood in Yuri’s room indicates the creatures kidnapped his daughter and outfits himself for a fight. Meanwhile, Yuri finds her mother, and while Dasha is not thinking the Ochi need to be hunted and killed, she likewise doesn’t think Yuri should have anything to do with them. Yuri just wants to return the baby to its mother. Can she?
If there’s one thing A24 movies are known for, it’s that they are often creative and at least a little weird. There’s a lot here that seems familiar, and it should. This is the sort of story that has been told many times where a child finds and befriends some weird thing that the rest of the world would just assume think is some kind of monster. What makes this one what it is is a general charm, the strong performances of Dafoe and Watson, and the Ochi itself, a rather impressive puppet. There’s a nice bit of A24 weirdness, one that never quite defines what the Ochi as a species are entirely, leaving a nice touch of mystery that isn’t quite spelled out for the viewer.
However, the movie does have a flaw, and that’s the soundtrack. It’s not bad music: it’s just loud, and given Zengel’s Yuri doesn’t talk very loudly, I honestly had a hard time understanding what she was saying in many of her early scenes. She’s not the only one, but she is the most noticeable, making The Legend of Ochi into something that felt like a mumblecore E.T. Fortunately, this isn’t the kind of movie that relies too heavily on using dialogue to give out exposition, but it is something that bothered me. It doesn’t detract much from this weird little movie, though, and it manages to achieve it’s own distinctive look without a computer-generated background made up of weird blocks at, no doubt, a fraction of the budget. That alone makes this more of a must-see than anything with an ender pearl.
Grade: B+
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