Emily Watson, Isaiah Saxon, Helena Zengel and Finn Wolfhard at “The Legend of Ochi” premiere (photo by Soul Brother / Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Bailey Pennick
“I started making this film when I was 12 years old. My dad, a Ukrainian Jew, took me to the Castro in San Francisco to see 2001: A Space Odyssey,” says Isaiah Saxon before premiering The Legend of Ochi to a packed-to-the-gills Library Center Theatre in Park City, Utah. While Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece is often cited as influential for filmmakers of all levels, Saxon credits 2001 with a very specific inspiration for The Legend of Ochi. “You know when the monkey throws the bone up and it cuts to the satellite? I was so upset! I just wanted them to stick with the monkeys!”
Saxon sees his original vision through and sticks with the monkeys or, rather, monkeylike creatures for his feature film debut at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Meet the Ochi — a fuzzy wild animal that lives in the forests and among the villagers of a fictional eastern European island. With bright orange fur and blue faces, the Ochi are easy to spot, but they’re scarce on Carpathia due to a roaming gang of teen boys (including Finn Wolfhard) and an aging father (a perfect Willem Dafoe) obsessed with hunting the creatures down for revenge. When a baby Ochi gets separated from its clan and is injured, a young Yuri (Helena Zengel) casts aside inherited prejudices and vows to help the baby get back to its family.
The Legend of Ochi is a lush and whimsical adventure, but it feels surprisingly lived-in and familiar. You can feel the dirt under the fingernails of Dafoe and Emily Watson as they try to sway their daughter (Zengel) in different directions. “I really wanted kids to be able to perceive the Ochi as just another animal,” explains Saxon during the post-premiere Q&A for the Family Matinee film. “Not so much a mythical forest creature, but just an animal that maybe they hadn’t yet seen the BBC nature documentary on yet. That came to the design of the Ochi, but also the design of the island of Carpathia. It was just all in effort to make you feel like maybe this is real, I just hadn’t learned about it yet.”
Maybe this is real is one of the most delightful parts of The Legend of Ochi, and it seems like it’s a feeling that was shared by its actors. “When I first read [the script] and I knew there was going to be the creature, I was wondering if it’s going to be like the air or Isaiah talking to me all the time, so I was like, ‘this could either be cool or annoying,’” Zengel laughs, recalling her thought process around accepting the role of Yuri. “Then when I heard it was going to be, like, [an actual] creature, I was like, ‘I’m down. I’m doing it.’” The whole cast nods in agreement. But where is the Ochi? “The puppet is lying limp in a storage facility somewhere,” jokes Saxon. “He couldn’t join us either.”
