You’ll find out in the first 10 minutes whether “The Legend of Ochi” is working for you. Me? I was in by minute five, and stayed there, even with some bumps along the way. Movies steeped in fantasy and existing or newly hatched folklore can whip up anything and everything, usually digitally, which often erases half of the potential visual magic. Anything’s possible, but not everything’s advisable.

The writer-director Isaiah Saxon, making a strong feature debut here, knows this and proves it. While “The Legend of Ochi” mixes digital effects, robotics, puppetry and a host of practical, non-digital design and manipulation for the creatures of the title, Saxon goes easy on the digital ingredients. An art school grad, he hand-painted 200 or so matte paintings, the digital background illusions of an earlier filmmaking time, as part of the overall geographic imaginings.

On the mountainous island of Carpathia, somewhere in the Black Sea, the teenage Yuri (Helena Zengel) is being raised by her father, Maxim (Willem Dafoe), a credulous, lonely man who lives to hunt the ochi. These predators, the people say, have been killing sheep and even a human or two. Maxim leads a group of young boys on their first hunt, including his adopted son, Petro (Finn Wolfhard of “Stranger Things”), with Yuri in tow, in the film’s nighttime prologue.

Yuri’s instincts tell her this is all wrong. Also, she’s had it with being stuck in the gendered margins of how boys and girls are prioritized in her corner of the world. Driven by a longing to find her mother (Emily Watson), who fled the family years earlier, the pensive, ever-watchful girl runs away. Long story short: girl meets ochi; frees ochi from a nasty metal trap set by humans; and the film becomes a sweet, sad, fraught and well-tested friendship across species, as Yuri comes to learn the ochi’s sung (or, rather, chirped) language, an emotion-based mode of communication.

Filmed in the Transylvanian mountains of Romania, Saxon and company capture a pretty stunning array of valleys, caves, rivers and urban areas. The movie is tightly packed with incident, maybe overpacked, but Saxon’s fairy tale is an intense, lived-in experience, its centuries-old folkloric atmosphere dotted with all the usual intrusive elements of progress: cars, grunge metal, supermarkets (in one memorable scene, Yuri makes an eventful trip to the grocery store with her newfound ochi hiding in her backpack).

There are clear bits and ideas derived from 1970s and ’80s titles, chiefly “E.T.,” “Gremlins” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Writer-director Saxon acknoweldges another influence: the great, undervalued “The Black Stallion.” There’s an unusually fine musical score from David Longstreth, as eccentric in its woodwind-forward instrumentation as it is effective. And as Yuri, longing for a family unit to call her own, Zengel couldn’t be better. When Dafoe’s foolish, preoccupied father mutters a line from his runaway daughter’s note — “I am strong and cool / I don’t believe what you say about anything / Don’t look for me, OK? / Thanks, bye” — we hear Dafoe, of course, but also the shadow voice of Zengel. A terrific talent, she’s a key reason why “The Legend of Ochi” takes us somewhere worth the trip.

_______

'THE LEGEND OF OCHI'

3.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG (for violent content, a bloody image, smoking, thematic elements and some language)

Running time: 1:35

How to watch: in theaters Friday

_______

©2025 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.