A Stunningly Beautiful Fantasy Throwback

OCHI are mythological forest types that convey in sensations rather than words (and also through a vocal technique that involves splitting a single melody across two different sounds). By contrast, Isaiah Saxon’The legend of Ochi“A somewhat imaginative but brilliantly crafted adventure story that communicates mostly in visuals.

Images like: A teenage girl wandering the Carpathian Mountains with a small woodland creature—imagine if Willem Dafoe and a cocky golden monkey were fused together in pastel facades of blue-eyed shade—riding in her backpack. like actual Willem Dafoe wears a suit of World War I armor as he leads a swarm of kids who want to put the girl down to chase the girl. Like Emily Watson driving a pickup truck with a wooden handle and blasting Italian rock music is one of the most beautiful matte paintings This side of “Black Narcissus” It extends to the landscape around. “The Legend of Ochi” may not have a lot to say (particularly in any form of spoken language), but it certainly offers a lot to see.

These almost handcrafted visuals are reminiscent, straddling the line between ancient worlds and modern technology with a charm that would be instantly familiar from Shakson’s music video with film Animation Studio Encyclopedia Pictura. The rustic and gharar piece they created for Björk’s 2007 Banger”wandering“It almost seems like a proof of concept for the world that Ochi will eventually do (Watson’s performance is Björk-encoded in a way that feels like a lore homage). This world – a fantasy island that feels like a little pocket world nestled in the overlap between 1992 and “Never-ending story” -It would seem like a pretty normal place to grow up if not for the threat posed by the mysterious Ochi, who lives in the shadows and supposedly eats livestock at night.

But the danger extends to humans as well. Yuri (Helena Zengel) has grown up to believe that Ochi destroyed her family. Her loving military father Maxime (Dafoe, in full Eggers mode) blames the monsters for luring his wife and depriving him of the dream of a son — hence the rabble of missing boys he assembles to hunt Ochi every night, a group led by a Twiggy Orphan named Petro (Finn Wolfhard) who treats… Maxim as his own.

But Yuri has changed her rights from her father and his father-like obsession with creatures he blames for “taking her mother away from them,” and when she finds an injured child in the woods one night, it’s immediately clear that the adult-eyed doll understands her in a way no human ever has. (That Baby Ochi looks exactly like Yuri’s father is irrelevant to the plot, and may not be intentional, but it still adds a much-needed layer of Freudian dream logic to a film whose story is often too straightforward for its own good.) Like Baby Ochi, Yuri was isolated from the only family she’d ever known. Perhaps by returning the creature to its lair in the heart of the island, the girl will be able to reconcile the comforts of home with the call of the wild.

“The Legend of Ochi” is loosely knit around the cognitive dissonance of feeling like you don’t belong in your family, as Yuri and Maxim are a pair of uncivilized characters in the middle of an elaborate counterworld of the environment the Saxons have created around them. Yet both simultaneously lived-in and unnatural, Karratha Island itself vividly conveys Yuri’s crisis to the point that her need to belong feels like it’s always on the tip of her tongue, even if words are never more than a primitive tool (the note says She leaves it to her father before running away: “I’m strong and cold and I don’t care what you think.”).

Saxon’s most consistent strength as an artist is his ability to create completely immersive spaces at the intersection between emotional reality and environmental fantasy, his first feature being a strange mixture of the real and the unreal that has stifled some of the happy props that revolve around him. Assuming it must have been created with artificial intelligence (Doubts of that being the film itself are instantly dispelled, as each of its images—every wrinkle of Uchi’s nose, every green inch of her mossy breath—breathes with so much vitality of its own as to feel like a soulless imitation of life.) This knee-jerk reaction seems all the more cynical and embarrassing in hindsight, because “The Legend of Ochi” is nothing if not a story about — and an example of — the power of personalized personal expression in a world all too eager to cash in on entire languages, visual and otherwise, in the makings of claims. Raw.

It may not be anything more than that. For all the film’s sensual richness (which extends to the brilliance of the puppets, the airy Carpathian sheen of David Longstreth’s score, and the almost sheltered splendor of the Skull Island-like cave system The Ochi Calling Home), which for some reason sounds too much like “The Legend of Ochi” rises To tell it for a reason It must be told for a reason It must be told for a reason It must be told for a reason It must be told: Feelings abound, but the human audience may struggle to access the same emotion that is supposed to Ochi is able to extract it from her.

The film skips one semi-stiff effect over another (Dafoe telling his child to “remember every word like it was the last drop of your mother’s milk,” Urie’s affection for a black metal band called Hell Throne, etc.), but Saxon’s characters tend to wear these quirks like costumes. For a story that takes place in a tactile, cohesive fantasy world, it’s frustrating that its narrative arcs stay at a distance rather than getting closer to the heart of the matter. As a result, the stakes at play rarely feel as imaginative as those that make them so obvious, and the film drags in a way it can’t quite recover from when it slows to explain itself during the second act. Carpathia is a strange and magical place that I’m thrilled to visit, but I hope that Next World Saxon will allow us to feel the land more deeply while we’re there, and give us more to take home with us when we leave.

Grade: C+

“The Legend of Ochi” is set in 2025 Sundance Film Festival. A24 will release it in theaters on Friday, April 25.

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