THE LEGEND OF OCHI is a beautiful and imaginative PG-rated fantasy from A24. Since the number of friends I recommended it to this week that had never heard of it is higher than the number of people at the Saturday matinee I went to, I’m thinking there are limits to that company’s marketing powers. But future adults who remember seeing it in a theater will know they had cool parents. This one is special.

It was filmed “on location in the remote mountain villages of Transylvania” and other parts of Romania, set on the fictional island of Carpathia. Apparently it’s the early ‘90s, though the time doesn’t matter that much. Maxim (Willem Dafoe, LIGHT SLEEPER), who lives in a small village on the north side of the island, is obsessed with fighting off furry, ape-like creatures called Ochi, who live in the nearby mountains. He trains the local adolescent boys in riflery and leads them into the woods on night time hunts. This is not a situation where he’s the lone true believer and everybody else thinks he’s crazy – Ochi are a fact of Carpathian life. In the opening scene the troop encounters a group of them, gets attacked, shoots some of them, but not fatally.

Maxim has a daughter named Yuri (Helena Zengel, NEW OF THE WORLD) who he brings on the hunt even though it’s an explicitly masculine activity and she thinks most of her father’s interests are “stupid.” He seems much fonder of her older adopted brother Petro (Finn Wolfhard, GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S PINOCCHIO), who’s kind of a kiss-ass. Maxim is one of those characters who ended up so thoroughly specific to Willem Dafoe that you imagine if he’d been unavailable they would’ve had to cancel the whole movie. He has a Wes Anderson absurdity and a Robert Eggers mania and he wears wolf-themed armor and seems to think he’s General Patton or R. Lee Ermey as he makes speeches to a bunch of little boys in a shed. When he laments that the Ochi took from him his wife and his chance to ever have a son I thought of Charlize Theron in PROMETHEUS when her dad Guy Pearce said the same type of shit right in front of her. But this guy has a daughter and an adopted son! What the fuck, dude. Please return your Not The Worst Father Ever mug. And then we learn that despite the sound of it his wife was not killed by an Ochi at all, she’s still very alive, she just left him, which seems more than reasonable even before we find out the reason.

One day Maxim sends Yuri to check the traps, and she finds an injured baby Ochi in one of them. She keeps him a secret, bandaging his leg and gaining his trust by putting in vampire fangs and hissing at him. Then she leaves home on a journey to the mountains where the Ochi are believed to live, hoping to return him to his family. The next day, when Maxim notices she’s gone, he finds a (very funny) note explaining that she’s run away, but also some fur and blood, so he tells his little army that she’s been kidnapped by the Ochi and leads them on a rescue mission.

As with so many of the A24 releases, vibes and style are crucial. The music is very distinct – not just the outstanding score by David Longstreth of the band Dirty Projectors, but also the eclectic mix of source songs playing on radios, from old Romanian (?) ballads to Yuri’s precious speed metal. The movie is gorgeously shot on what looks to me like 16mm film (director of photography: Evan Prosofsky), it’s full of interesting faces and dry humor, with some similarities to MOONRISE KINGDOM and THE HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE (and maybe a drop of RIDDLE OF FIRE), but it treats its fantasy very seriously. First time writer/director Isaiah Saxon was co-director (along with Sean Hellritsch) of the incredible 2008 Björk video “Wanderlust.” When I realized that I knew I had to see this. He’s a real artist who painted over 200 matte paintings used to create this world. The baby Ochi (who Yuri does not name – he’s not her pet) is very expressive and life-like, done with rod puppets and animatronics and I assumed there would have had to be some digital elaboration, but maybe not, from what I’ve read since.

During her journey Yuri gets into trouble in town (she steals a car), learns to communicate with the Ochi and understand some of their ways, gets a horrifying infection and even meets her mother Dasha (Emily Watson, EQUILIBRIUM), who is not some idealized angel but is pretty cool. She’s a shepherd and has a wooden hand.

The whole thing looks amazing and is funny and cute, but what makes it a home run for me is the perfect landing – one of those climaxes where everything comes together so nicely that even things it wouldn’t have occurred to me would be resolved find their perfect conclusions. It gets very tense and then it’s sweet and emotional and it’s also a “That’ll do, pig” ending in the sense that it goes right from the emotional peak to the credits.

And it has some thematic depth to it. (SPOILERS.) I love that Maxim (named after the magazine?) is pushing this idea of an ancient tradition of warriordom, with an official seal and inspirational speeches and all this, and then shortly after he confesses that a major part of it (his grandfather’s knife that he tried to pass down to Yuri) is just some bullshit he made up because he “thought it looked cool,” we learn from a cave painting of a real ancient tradition of humans peacefully co-existing with the Ochi and communicating with them using flutes. Even Maxim is moved by it!

I don’t like that thing where you compare modern family movies to Amblin, because it sounds so nostalgic, and I don’t think this is doing that at all. In fact, Saxon mentions in a director’s statement sent out by A24 that although he loves E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL it’s a movie he didn’t see until he was 25, so it’s not some piece of his childhood he’s still clinging on to. But THE LEGEND OF OCHI does have a quality people are talking about when they bring up Amblin, which is that it’s a sweet movie that respects kids enough to have some edge to it, like life does. There is some tragedy to her family life that won’t all be fixed, she has some sadness and anger and things to rebel against, and that’s okay. Although it’s played for laughs I think there’s also some genuine menace to the macho, militaristic attitudes Maxim is trying to pass down to the boys of Carpathia. Right after Dasha calls them his “toy soldiers” they’re ransacking her basement like American soldiers terrorizing families in Afghanistan. And then they surround her and point their guns at her like that’s what they’re supposed to do. Nobody ever questions it. Little cop bastards.

It’s so effective because Yuri mostly just opposes all that with her kind actions, not with words, except when she succinctly tells Petro, “You’re only nice when people aren’t looking.” Yuri believes, and maybe the movie agrees, that if you don’t teach them otherwise people can be naturally gentle and good.

I don’t want to overhype it, it’s small and simple, but I tell ya man, I loved this movie, and more people deserve to know about it. I will do my part to spread the legend of THE LEGEND OF OCHI.