The Legend of Ochi premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. This initial review was timed for its world premiere embargo.
A child befriending a creature everyone else thinks is too dangerous to befriend is the backbone of many memorable coming-of-age stories, from Free Willy and The Black Stallion to E.T. and How to Train Your Dragon. It’s the ultimate fantasy for young people: just getting a strange, misunderstood, unique creature in a way no one else can.
A24’s almost-fantasy-adventure, almost-family-drama movie The Legend of Ochi, from writer-director Isaiah Saxon, follows in that vein. The creature in question is an ochi, an apelike animal unique to the film and native to the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe. And the child is Yuri (Helena Zengel), a lonely teenage girl who’s still dealing with the aftermath of a family tragedy.
While some moments of the movie spark the same magic and sense of connection as the classic movies in this very specific movie subgenre, the family drama and the creature plotline never quite click together. While these elements often go together like Hiccup and Toothless, they end up undermining each other 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 remote Carpathian village, where the ochi, mythical creatures that look a bit like yeti-ape hybrids with sharp teeth, roam the mountains and forest. Yuri feels isolated from her father, Maxim (Willem Dafoe), who’s made it his mission to recruit the young men of the village in hopes of driving the ochi out. Maxim blames the ochi for his failed marriage, because his wife left him after they lost their son to ochi attacks.
Yuri butts heads with both Maxim and Petro (Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard), an orphan Maxim took in and is raising to be a seasoned ochi hunter. After Yuri finds a baby ochi, she decides to run away and return the creature to its home in the woods. She bonds with the creature — and also comes face-to-face with her mother (Emily Watson), who now lives alone in an isolated cabin and studies the ochi, much like Hiccup’s lost mother, Valka, in How to Train Your Dragon 2.
The relationship between Yuri and the baby ochi is the strongest thread of the movie. The creature is adorable, and Saxon’s use of puppetry to bring it to life makes their interactions more tactile and believable. It’s charming when the ochi communicates in little murmurs and growls, and even more so when Yuri begins to understand what those sounds mean. Zengel does a great job of acting against the puppet, and really sells Yuri’s almost bullheaded conviction that she can bond with this creature and march safely into ochi territory to take it home, even when her mother warns her that it would likely mean the baby’s death, because the adult ochi will reject it.
While Yuri and the ochi are captivating, Saxon doesn’t spend nearly enough time with them. Nor does he spend enough time on the messy family dynamics that motivate Yuri to run away in the first place. That latter lack ends up undermining the movie the most. Yuri’s family has supposedly been broken apart by the ochi, but viewers don’t get much sense of what their family was like before the attack, and their current motives feel unclear and contradictory.
When a family movie splits up the family for most of the run time, it’s important to make sure the audience still understands who these characters are and what they mean to each other. But Saxon doesn’t take time to establish them as people before sending Yuri off on her adventure, and the rest of the movie only has a few interactions between them.
Still, the actors pull off a few small, touching moments quite well when they are together. Yuri’s mom gently braids her hair while Yuri rests after getting hurt. A late conversation between Yuri and Maxim is a lovely throwback to their first interaction, one that feels genuine, as father and daughter try to relate to each other in the movie’s endgame. But there aren’t enough of these moments to really sell the family story.
Given that Saxon doesn’t spend enough time either with Yuri and the ochi or with Yuri and her family, the movie’s two biggest emotional arcs never fully come together. The ending, which is supposed to bring them together in a big cathartic moment, doesn’t feel earned. There’s a slight twinge of relief, but it’s immediately muddled by a sense of Wait — how did this even happen? because there isn’t enough meaningful buildup. All the threads are there, and they’re even looped in and out of each other. But they’re never pulled tight or tied together enough to hold the story together.
The Legend of Ochi hits theaters on April 25.
The post A24’s family fantasy The Legend of Ochi has a frustrating family problem appeared first on Polygon.
