The Legend of Ochi (2025) NYICFF 2025

An ADDENDUM before we start:

This piece has gone through several drafts each one stripping  away the discussion and leaving just a list of grievences, making me wonder if I should have posted this for Festivus. It wasn't unintentional it was something that just happened.  The reason it happened was that I have been trying to explain my feeling for this film and it's gone from a simple "I like it but it's a mess" to more iterations until now where I realize that I am angrily disappointed in this film - almost everything works - I mean it looks great, the cast is there, the creatures are awesome- but the script is so lacking in characters and reasoning that the narrative thread snaps from the first instant- we are never told anything that gives us a backstory of what is happening or why; nor do we get real characters but line drawings (I won't insult the notion of sketches).  There is a sense that the director knows it all (this could have been a 5-hour film) but he just doesn't show it or thinks that his target audience of six-year-olds will never notice. And the fact that so much seems to be missing pisses me off because this should have been a truly awesome film that lived in my heart forever and instead it's become a piece of junk I want desperately to break apart so that someone will rescue the tale and tell it the right way, with real reasons and real characters that aren't lazily drawn to the point none of them make sense. I want the film that the pieces promise not this broken doll with its limbs and head chopped off. I should not have had to spend 100 plus minutes spending each one asking about why and what and how. I should have drifted off on the story. And because this film doesn't explain anything-internally nothing makes sense - I am left with not so much a review but an abbreviated list of questions about things I should never have noticed.

I apologize but this film broke my heart (I mean look at the Ochi they are so damn cool)

THE REVIEW

Ever since I saw THE LEGEND OF OCHI at NYICFF my friends were asking what I thought of the film.  I wasn't sure what to say. Should I tell them how good the film looks? Or should I talk about the grand operatic score? Or should I tell them the creatures are very well done.?

Did I say any of that? No.What I said was simply "It's a mess"

I don't care that the director said he made the film for kids, the film makes no sense.

The film takes place on the island of Carpathia which is in the Black Sea. The island is shared by a group of people and some big blue creatures called ochi which occassionally kill the live stock and the people. The people, lead by Willem Dafoe, hunt the ochi. WHen Dafoe's daughter finds a small ochi she decides to  return it to its family.  This doesn't sit well with he father assumes she has been kidnapped and wih his band of lost boys goes to find rescue her.

I don't know where to start but while the film looks great the rest of the film really is a mess.

I don't know if the script was as much of a mess as the film is, but I sure hope not. Nothing in the film is explained or hangs together. I have no impressions of the film,  I only just an endless list of a questions and plot problems. Raymond Chandler said that an audience will forgive one, perhaps two unexplained turns (one of the shootings in THE BIG SLEEP is never explained), but more than that you will lose the audience. OCHI is full of unexplained turns and questions requiring answers. Here is a brief list of some of them:

- Is this a serious film or comedy? Willem Dafoe is so far over the top and his delivery is so out there I didn't now if I was supposed to be laughing or not. It seems like a comedy but no one was laughing.

-There is no real back story. We are told the monsters and the people are on the island and they don't get along, but there is no effort to explain what exactly happened. This leaves us with no idea why is Dafoe is such a homicidal nut job.

-There is no explanation of the monsters. NONE.  The bits we know- that they live in the woods... er caves on the island and hunt live stock makes no sense.  They are animals, until they aren't.

-There is no character development. NONE. We have no idea who anyone is. We kind of have a vague sense of the three leads were a family, but beyond that we have nothing. This is especially interesting since the band of boys who hunt with Dafoe are given prominence on the poster, but all we now is that they cast offs from families and orphans. We know nothing  about any of them except that one of them speaks with a Brooklyn accent (his only line). (And why does their look make them seem more like thugs/ fascists  then kids?)

- A terrium of catepillars? With no top and no sense that they will be butterflies?

-Everyone speas with a different accent, and language. Dafoe speas like himself, Helena Hengel speaks with a scandanavian accent and Emily Watson speaks with an accent from Mars. One boy sounds like he is from Brooklyn. The music played on the radio is in a variety of different languages. The guy who has his car stolen speaks in a Slavic language.

-Emily Watson knows all this information about the ochi, but we don't now how. She allegedly taught her daughter words of the ochi, but we don't know anything. She know where they live but she never saw the paintings in the cave. She ran after her daughter... and brought her flute?

- When the daughter the daughter realizes she can speak ochi the film is subtitled...just for that one scene.

- Why does travel across the island takes however along it requires the plot.

-We have no sense of anyone on the island other then Dafoe and the related characters. There is no sense of the society living there even though we see them. Why did they send their kids to Dafoe? What about school? 

-There is no reason that Dafoe goes from a psychotic Peter Pan to loving father.

-Why does one of Dafoes boys break into the house and trash the place when they are just there to see if the daughter is there? (There is a whole line of questioning here about the society where this happens, why they can misbehave and why they cross the line from being thugs to being de facto fascist soldiers)

- What is the deal with the Petro character? One minute he's good soldier, the next he's kind of sweet on the daughter and the next he's being a bad guy again...until he's not. This just highlights that no one arcs and no event naturally happens things just happen because the director says so.

There is more, much more. Almost every moment in the film will have you asking questions. I took pages and pages of notes much to amusement of the people sitting a couple of seats down the row.

This film feels like it was a thousand-page novel and it was cut to a fraction of that length.

Weirdly the film kind of works (as long as you don't think about it). The reason is the score which does all the heavy lifting by cueing us to what we are supposed to feel. The film is so cliched in construction and the score works so well that even if you have noticed all the missing material the end still will make you weepy- why? Because the score fixlls in all the holes.

Is it a bad film? Objectively, oh yea. The narrative just doesn't work. But emotionally... it kind of does at least enough that if you can let the music carry you to where you are five years old and don't know about plot holes.

Ultimately this film pisses me off more than any film has in the last year or so. Why? Because so much of the film works, the visuals, the music, the creatures... that the complete failure of the script to work  is a freaking shame. Had it worked it would have been an instant classic, instead its a major disappointment... a disappoint will even hit the film's five year old fans once they are old enough to ask questions.