Sundance 2025 Review: THE LEGEND OF OCHI, Family-Oriented Fantasy-Adventure For the Win

After two decades directing a plethora of shorts, commercials, and music videos, writer-director Isaiah Saxon makes his official feature-length debut with The Legend of Ochi, a richly imagined, Amblin-influenced family-oriented fantasy-adventure set in a semi-contemporary mythical Eastern Europe.

 

Bolstered by  environmental themes, a visually stunning palette, on-location cinematography that makes the film look far more expensive than its actual cost, and another scene-stealing turn by Willem Dafoe as a half-crazed creature hunter, The Legend of Ochi suggests great, possibly greater things to come for Saxon as a filmmaker. 

 

The Legend of Ochi centers on Yuri (Helena Zengel, News of the World), a sensitive, lonely teen living on a rundown farm with her father, Maxim (Dafoe), a hunter obsessed with hunting down and killing the not-so-mythical, forest dwelling creatures that periodically venture into or near human habitats for food or other resources. Led by Maxim, the villagers see the Ochi as an existential threat to their rural way of life, vermin who must be be removed from the local mountainous environment at all and/or any cost.

 

To that end, the unseen village elders sent their teen sons to Maxim for military training. Co-led by Maxim’s semi-adopted son, Petro (Finn Wolfhard, underused in a minor, monosyllabic role), the boys learn how to use and maintain firearms, practice coordinated maneuvers, and otherwise wait for Maxim to deem them ready to actively pursue the Ochi when they next venture close to the village. The boys are mostly nameless or speak in monosyllables, content to be led by Maxim and Petro, fighting in a righteous cause to protect their homes and families. Contrary to Maxim's simplistic, reductive sermonizing, the truth is far more complicated. 

 

In a deeply disquieting set piece, Maxim takes his boy-soldiers and Yuri on a nighttime hunt of the Ochi. Almost immediately, all heck breaks loose; chaos reigns. Saxon eloquently captures the fog of war and its impact on first the boys, then Maxim, and finally Helena. Individually and collectively, the hunters find themselves in a life-or-death struggle with the Ochi.

 

In the aftermath of the melee, the fur-covered, cave-dwelling Ochi leave one of their own behind, a toddler left to fend for itself. When it’s caught and injured in a trap, Yuri responds, not like a hunter hunting its prey, but as the member of one species reaching out to another, sentient, self-aware one.

 

Almost immediately, Yuri finds herself on the outs with her clueless, narrow-minded father. He’s spent most of his life hating and hunting the othered Ochi. He can’t imagine the Ochi in positive terms, only as pests, nuisances, or worst. In turn, his ideological inflexibility convinces Yuri the only answer for the Ochi in her care lies in returning it to the mountains and its kind. Cue Yuri and the unnamed Ochi going on an adventure, with Maxim and his indoctrinated soldiers closely following behind.

 

The Legend of Ochi loses focus when it introduces Yuri’s long-lost mother, Dasha (Emily Watson), into the mix. Her reasons for leaving Maxim seem clear (their different takes on the Ochi), but not why she’d leave Yuri behind with a supremely unfit father. Apparently, all that matters is that Dasha and Yuri reunite, reconnect, and reestablish their long-gone relationship as mother and daughter.

 

Once The Legend of Ochi gets past its muddled family dynamics, however, it gets right back on track, focusing on Yuri and her Ochi companion, their bonding (obligatory), and a curious development that won’t be spoiled here, but it's one that turns their subsequent interactions into an utter delight that both parents and their children will surely appreciate. It’s also a neat, clever way of resolving the fundamental issue of communication between two disparate species.

 

Honed by years of short-form filmmaking, Saxon brings a uniquely keen visual eye to The Legend of Ochi. Even when Saxon’s film stumbles narratively or leaves character motivation wanting, Sazon's visuals are always front and center, ready to deliver equal parts wonder and awe to family-oriented audiences.