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The Legend of Ochi Movie Review

The Legend of Ochi is a 2025 family fantasy adventure film directed by Isaiah Saxon and starring Helena Zengel. It’s a surprisingly tranquil movie for better and for worse.

A young girl learns to never go outside after dark because of reclusive forest creatures known as the ochi. However, when a baby ochi is left behind by its pack, she embarks on the adventure of a lifetime to reunite it with its family. This is such a traditional film that could have been made in any decade during the 20^th century. I appreciated that old-fashioned adventure charm to it quite a bit.

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My main issue with this movie is its deliberate pacing. The pacing is so slow that I cannot imagine children enjoying this film all that much, but the dialogue is so sparse and the plot so basic that it’s not suitable for adults either. It sits so uneasily in that middle and that was its biggest problem. But it has a terrific environmental message and an interesting depiction of the power of animal communication, so it’s at least worth checking out for that.

The cast is interesting here, though they did not all work for me. It was great seeing Helena Zengel of ‘News of the World’ fame. Although her constant whispering really got on my nerves, she nonetheless was one of the highlights here. The characterization is slight overall, but the actress was quite likable in the role. I also really liked Emily Watson as her rugged look was quite different for her. Her character’s monologuing was excessive, but otherwise she was reliably strong.

But the men fared worse here. Finn Wolfhard continues to get numerous roles in Hollywood and I like him, but he was definitely typecast here and not all that memorable. As for Willem Dafoe, this is yet another one of his over-the-top roles where he gets to yell a lot and I am simply tired of the same shtick used again and again.

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The Legend of Ochi is at its best when it’s focusing on its titular creature. He did look a lot like Gizmo or Baby Yoda, but in actuality we already have a species that looks like this – the golden snub-nosed monkey. Thus, the movie wasn’t all that fantastical to me. But the sounds that he uses were interesting and that entire element was quite endearing.

The film simply needed to have more action set pieces or at least some memorable plot points and suspense included as the basic plot mirrored ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ way too much to the point of seeming like a rip-off at times. The score is gorgeous and the cinematography is quote good, but you can see that this director did music videos before his debut here. He has a strong sense of audio-visuals telling a story, but he needs more work in the script and dialogue departments.

As for the VFX, I loved the ochi themselves and the puppetry used for them was wonderful, but the rest of the movie looked like obviously rendered CGI, especially in the backgrounds. The Carpathian setting did wonders to make the film feel more lived-in and cozy, though once again Romania was depicted in a stereotypically rugged and hillbilly manner.

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