The world depicted in The Legend of Ochi is exactly the sort of place you’d expect to find Willem Dafoe – somewhere beautiful and strange that lets him clatter around in a suit of Slavic armour and bellow his words like he’s trying to bring down a mountain. Dafoe plays a man called Maxim, who lives on the fantastical island of Carpathia and has dedicated his life to the eradication of a mythical creature known as the Ochi. These are small orangutans put through the Dark Crystal, Jim Henson-puppet blender, who feast nightly on the village livestock and whom Maxim blames for his wife’s disappearance.
Elsewhere, Maxim mourns his lack of a male heir, so he performs paternity instead with the band of child soldiers he’s gathered around him and the orphan he’s raised as his own – Petro (a wildly underutilised Finn Wolfhard from Stranger Things). This has an obvious ill effect on his introverted but strong-willed daughter, Yuri (Helena Zengel). So, when she comes across a juvenile Ochi caught in a trap, she tends to its wounds and swiftly discovers the animal’s natural curiosity and kindness, forcing her to relearn man’s relationship with nature and begin the fight for peaceful coexistence.
