But Maxim won’t allow his own daughter, Yuri (Helena Zengel), to join in, for reasons that have a lot more to do with him than with her. Angry and disaffected, Yuri seethes mostly alone, and longs to talk to her mother, who left the family a long time ago. It doesn’t help that Petro idolizes Maxim and is rude to Yuri in front of the other boys. Then, one night, Yuri discovers a baby Ochi who seems lost and injured. Determined to return the creature to its home, she sets off on a great adventure, with Maxim soon hot on her trail.
It is not hard to spot the derivative nature of this plot, with all its classic ’80s movie elements: the creatures the humans would rather kill than understand; the divorced parents; the disaffected young person; the hero’s journey. I don’t mean that in a bad way, though: “The Legend of Ochi” is designed to pay tribute to a kind of movie that rarely gets made anymore, even though the success of the similarly derivative Netflix show “Stranger Things” suggests that there’s an appetite for it. Echoing tropes of that era is one way to remind us of what we used to see down at the multiplex.
But the attraction of those movies wasn’t just their stories. It was their poetry, the feast they created for our eyes and ears. “The Legend of Ochi” is light on story — you kind of know what’s going to happen all the time — and that, coupled with occasionally garbled dialogue, makes it easy to zone out at times. But in its place it serves up a nourishing banquet for the senses. Mossy greens, vivid landscapes covered in mist and sheep, a glimpse into an elaborate Orthodox church interior, marvelous caves, a world that seems suspended in time between the recent past and the not-very-recent past: It’s immersive in a way that isn’t showy, just lush, with flute melodies wafting on the wind.
There’s plenty that isn’t very subtle about the movie, too. Yuri is into metal, a thing Maxim discovers when he comes into her room looking for her and flips on her stereo, above which hangs a band poster with the slogans “Hell Throne” and “Destroy the Father.” It is, like many of its kind, a movie that externalizes the internal turmoil of feeling like an outsider while also reckoning with the realization that your parents are, after all, just people. In other words, it’s about being a teenager.
And then there are the Ochi, furry creatures who call to one another in registers of pure emotion and song. Of course they’re not the beasts the humans assume they are, nor are they the killers they’re scapegoated for being. They’re also just living here in this craggy wilderness, raising their families, living their lives together across generations. In the movies of the 1980s, it was clear where the repeated theme of the frightening stranger — who wasn’t frightening at all — came from, in that final decade of the Cold War. I suppose it’s no surprise that it’s resurfacing again.
The Legend of Ochi
Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters.
