I have mixed feelings when it comes to movies with puppets. Not that I don’t like puppets, on the contrary, some of my favourite movies of all time are Muppet movies, but very few people can tackle the mixture of craft and poetics you need to make my kind of movie. Too little and it’s a travesty. Too much, it gets pretentious.
So what about the super-indie Legend of Ochi, by debutant Isaiah Saxon featuring Emily Watson and Willem Dafoe?
The best way I can describe it is an independent documentary on the gorillas of Transylvania. “But there are no gorillas in Transylvania,” one might say. Well, there are now.
The main idea of the movie takes place on a remote island on the Black Sea, where villagers have been at war with a primate species whose sole bite can kill a man. The villagers hunt these creatures, the Ochi, and this has been taking its toll on society: the beasts are said to kill cattle, people are ruined with the destruction of whole flocks of sheep, and a lunatic farmer — Willem Dafoe — takes it upon himself to collect orphans and estranged children, organise them in a militia, and lead night-time hunts.
It all takes a turn when his estranged daughter finds a wounded child of these creatures, the Ochi, has the intuition they’re actually empathic and highly intelligent, and decides to bring him home to his mother (while maybe looking for hers).
The movie is made of long panoramic shots, loads of hiking and delicate interactions. It’s nothing revolutionary and the plot is fairly simple, but it’s honest in what to expect, and delivers.
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