@Courtesy of A24

Successfully presented at the last Sundance Film Festival, Isaiah Saxon‘s directorial debut proved to be a rather complex and mysterious mystery “object” to analyze, a feature film that is both well-defined and elusive, a contradiction in terms that even a few days after viewing it remains honestly difficult to resolve.

The best thing to do is then to begin with the plot: in a remote village in the Carpathians lives young Yuri (Helena Zengel), who would like to help her father Maxim (Willem Dafoe) and a group of other youngsters keep their village safe from the monstrous creatures that roam the surrounding forests at night. However, when the protagonist rescues and helps to survive one of these creatures, that’s when her view of things begins to change…

We need to go back to the analysis of The Legend of Ochi by writing that, from the point of internal consistency within the work itself, this tale directed by Saxon is a quite successful debut. Indeed, both the writing and the staging possess the necessary requisites to develop the suspended tone clearly intended by the filmmaker. Saxon employs the tools at his disposal to construct a rural fable that has in the realism of the setting an aesthetic glue capable of informing the entire feature. 

©Courtesy of A24

Once it has been established, then, that The Legend of Ochi is a work made according to rather clear ideas, it must however be testified to how strangely, indeed surprisingly,the result ends up being bland. Even if he never gets bored watching the movie, the spectator never ends up being drawn into the physical and emotional journey of young Yuri, since perhaps she is never really perceived to be in danger, especially when she decides to go on her journey of discovery about the mysterious creatures of the forest.

The Legend of Ochi feels in fact like a film we have seen several times before, a coming-of-age story where the metaphor contained in the fantasy setting does not turn into anything original or visually capable of sticking. And perhaps that very setting itself, which harks back in some way to the ‘social realism’ of many Eastern European films before the fall of the Soviet regime, may in the end have proved to be a limit to the director’s visual creativity. His feature film never seems to dare taking a different approach to these kinds of stories, sticking to established but rarely effective narrative and aesthetic binaries.

Similarly, the cast of actors do what they can with characters with little nuance. Helena Zengel, Finn Wolfhard, and Emily Watson do not make an impact, while Willem Dafoe, as often happens to him, proves to be the best on stage mainly by his always distinctive physicality, exhibited but never ostentatious. The great character actor, nominated for four Academy Awards, is by far the best thing of the feature film directed by Isiah Saxon. 

Fantasy with an environmentalist soul and a pulsating, poetic heart or dark fable about the difficulty of growing up in a world that harbors perils? The Legend of Ochi could be both but in the end fails to become either. Isiah Saxon, in the attempt to amalgamate the many (too many?) ideas contained in his film ends up not fully developing any of them, letting his feature drag on without much vehemence toward a conclusion that turns out to be exactly what one expects from the start. 

The consistency with which The Legend of Ochi has been set up is not enough to save it from the feeling of being a product that looks to this genre of movie by attempting to copy its directives without proposing anything of its own. Saxon’s first feature cannot be called a bad movie, but perhaps the problem is just that: it never finds the courage to fail. 

©Courtesy of A24

Rate: C

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Here’s the trailer for The Legend of Ochi: