The Legend of Ochi looks like nothing else released this decade, and that's the whole point of it. Writer-director Isaiah Saxon, making his feature debut after years directing music videos, built the film's title creature as a practical animatronic puppet operated by a team of puppeteers on set, rather than a CGI creation added in post. Helena Zengel plays Yuri, a girl from an isolated Carpathian village raised to fear and hunt the Ochi, who instead bonds with an orphaned baby of the species and sets out to return it to its family, away from her father's hunting party.
The film wears its influences openly — there's a clear debt to '80s creature-fantasy like The Dark Crystal and The NeverEnding Story — but it isn't nostalgia for its own sake. Saxon shot on 1930s-era lenses and built more than 200 matte paintings to stitch Romania's real Carpathian landscapes into a fictional country called Carpathia, and the seams barely show. Willem Dafoe, as Yuri's obsessive father, and Emily Watson, as her estranged mother fitted with a rigid prosthetic cast from the actor's own hand, both play their roles with a sincerity that keeps the film's whimsy from tipping into cutesiness.
A handmade creature-fantasy built from puppets and matte paintings, not pixels — and it looks like nothing else out this year.
Bring a kid if you have one, but don't assume this is only for children — its craft and its patience with quiet, wordless stretches will land better with an audience willing to slow down. In an era where most studio fantasy leans on volume and CGI scale, a small, handmade film built around puppetry and matte paintings is worth the ticket on craft alone.
The Legend of Ochi was written and directed by Isaiah Saxon in his feature debut, produced through A24 alongside AGBO, Encyclopedia Pictura, and Neighborhood Watch on a reported $10 million budget. The production shot on location in Romania's Carpathian Mountains, with additional work in a Bucharest studio, and relied on animatronics and puppetry for the Ochi creature rather than CGI, a choice the filmmakers described as both a budget necessity and an aesthetic one. Filming conditions were difficult enough that wild bears repeatedly wandered onto set at night, damaging the styrofoam set facades and forcing the crew to run lights and music overnight to keep them away.
The film opened in April 2025 to a warm critical response praising its handmade visual style and world-building, drawing frequent comparisons to Jim Henson-era creature fantasy, though its box office run stayed modest given A24's typically limited theatrical rollout for original titles. It has since been cited by several critics as a rare recent example of big-swing practical creature effects in a studio-adjacent fantasy film, and helped establish Saxon, previously known mainly for music videos and shorts, as a filmmaker worth watching in features.
