REVIEW: The Legend of Ochi

This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence.

But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi, does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else. Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism.

On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of monkey-like creatures called Ochi. These little guys may or may not be eating the sheep herds, but William DeFoe sure thinks they are. Makes sense. These guys totally look like the kinds of beasts that would naturally feast on livestock ... Our protagonist, Yuri, finds one of their young in a trap and spends all of ten seconds deciding whether or not to help it out. Daddy DeFoe's not a fan of this idea, but that's fine and good. Yuri's not a huge fan of her dad either. All interested parties find themselves converging over whether or not this little guy gets to go home.

The real star of the show is the golden monkey on Yuri's shoulder. Ochi reportedly had six different puppeteers orchestrating him at any given moment, resulting in an intricate tactile performance. The best thing we can ask for from this film is that storytellers might be curious to replicate this kind physical filmmaking, willing the fantastical into our world without always relying on the interface of computer-generated creatures.

But tragically, the magic of the puppet-work only winds up working against the movie.

The Ochi are presented as wholly natural in this world. Director Isaiah Saxon likened it to an existing primate species that hadn't featured on a BBC special yet. They are not supernatural and have no magical properties that would trigger the kind of superstitious hysteria that fuels this movie. Neither is Daddy some capitalist overlord trying to raze their territory to build like a shopping mall. The plight of the Ochi has no basis in real world discussions about deforestation, nor of adult distrust of childhood innocence or the concept of progress. And so the movie utterly fails to capture the realities of why people ever hated the mysterious or precious things of the world in the first place.

The movie quickly devolves into a lampoonery session for William DeFoe, who gets to the mouthpiece for some kind of amorphous archaism. William DeFoe hates the little critters because that generation can just be so backwards sometimes, don'cha agree? What attempt there is at psychology winds up feeling very shallow and incurious. The movie has this unspoken suggestion that his character is so mired in traditionalism because he just can't conceive of a world where it was okay for his wife to have left him. Yuri's dad has no microtraumas that would benefit from some examination, only a patriarchal delusion handed to him by some invisible hand in the sky.

More disappointing, there's no sign that Yuri herself ever bought into the propaganda she was raised on. And so her rescue of and subsequent adventure with the creature carries no thematic weight. Helena Zengel herself plays a believable weird girl, but her character is not being challenged and is taking no leap of faith. This is How to Train Your Dragon where it never crosses Hiccup's mind that the dragon might kill him if he lets it go. Congratulations, Yuri, for finding it in your heart to not kill fluffy Grogu ...

There are fleeting suggestions of ET that make you wish the movie was better than it actually is. Mostly in the golden lighting, or the wide shots of the mountain scape. I love childhood reverence for the mystical as much as the next film critic, but this film isn't really about the natural love children have for the small things of the world, or the tease of future discovery. It's about grown-ups.

Even if it doesn't want to be.

--The Professor

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