When The Legend of Ochi hits theaters April 25, it will mark something of a departure for A24. Up until now, the studio best known for movies like Midsommar, Hereditary, Uncut Gems, and Civil War has released a distinctly grown-up slate of features.
Now, A24 aims to be everything, everywhere, all at once is trying something new. Enter: The Legend of Ochi, the studio’s first-ever (with all due respect to Marcel the Shell With Shoes On) movie geared toward families. The film tells the story of a teenage farm girl named Yuri (Helena Zengel) who encounters a juvenile ochi – a mythical and feared creature – and embarks on a quest to return it home.
Zengel, along with the film’s director Isaiah Saxon and co-star Finn Wolfhard, stopped by IGN Fan Fest 2025 to debut a new poster for the movie and tell us about stepping into the rich and imaginative world of Carpathia.
“We’re looking at Helena Zengel with a baby ochi bursting from her chest, which is not an ode to Alien, but is more just a cute design,” Saxon jokes. “Around her, we’re seeing her parents, Willem Dafoe and Emily Watson, (and) her somewhat adopted older brother figure in Finn Wolfhard directly above.”
“And surrounding all of them is this gang of boys that are the local village children who’ve been indoctrinated and trained by her father to keep the village safe.”
The local village, set on the fictional island of Carpathia, is imbued with an immersive sense of wonder and nostalgia, not unlike classic fantasy-adventure movies from the 1980s. Wolfhard didn’t specifically seek that out when agreeing to make The Legend of Ochi, but its place in his career trajectory (which includes 80s-set Stranger Things and the newest entries in the Ghostbusters franchise) isn’t lost on him.
“For me it’s a coincidence. I’ve been really lucky to just read a bunch of awesome scripts and be able to do the films that I’m interested in,” Wolfhard explained. “And Ochi was so intoxicating. There has definitely been a theme of adventure movies that I’ve been in just because I grew up watching those movies and they’re some of my favorites ever. So I was lucky enough to be a part of another great one.”
And while Saxon says he may have drawn a tiny bit of inspiration from some classic IPs, his goal was to create something entirely new.
“Peope will say that it’s ‘Baby Yoda meets Goonies.’ But I think if you’re a filmmaker and you’re just cobbling together elements, it won’t have an inner life to it. The work will be dead. And so when I set out to make Ochi, I was just trying to make the story I wanted to see. And then you might do some research if you get stuck but you’re not taking elements off a shelf. You’re just trying to have it be born up from your soul if you can,” Saxon says.
Central to the movie is the ochi itself, and Saxon and the crew labored to use animatronics and practical effects to bring the creature to life. In fact, Zengel, who actually rescued an injured dog while filming the movie, became so enraptured with the ochi that the crew had a hard time separating them.
“It was amazing, because when I first read the script, I wasn’t sure if they were going to create an ochi,” Zengel says. “I know a lot of colleagues who have done movies like this and who have not had the chance to have an actual co-star. (The ochi) became my friend. And then they always had to pull me away from it because I would run off or I would want to go in the water with him.”
Saxon says that type of reaction is something he hopes audiences share when the movie opens.
“The goal of the design from the beginning was to create a plausible-feeling animal species,” Saxon says. “Not a mythic movie creature, but something that audiences and particularly kids could misunderstand as just an animal they hadn’t learned about. That’s also what guided the creation of the island of Carpathia; that it’s also a place that you can maybe think, ‘Hey have I just not learned about it yet?’”
The fictional setting was something Wolfhard found inspiring when filming on location in Romania.
“I knew that it was a big, expansive world from the script and the pitch video that Isaiah made. So much of the wonder was already kind of built in because of the baseline locations (where) we were filming. Isaiah had everything so meticulously planned out, so there was no question what world we were going to be living in once we got to the location,” Wolfhard says.
In addition to a first look at the new movie poster, the team from The Legend of Ochi is exclusively debuting pages from a special “In Search of the Ochi Field Guide” inspired by the film, and available for purchase on the A24 website, as part of IGN Fan Fest.
“The field guide is so awesome because it almost tricks the audience into believing that the world is more lived in and that it could be a real place,” Wolfhard says. “Carpathia could be a real place, but hasn’t been discovered yet or hasn’t been talked about yet. It also gives a little bit of interaction (to) the audience, which is always really fun.”
For her part, Zengel says that, while she has a copy of the field guide now, she didn’t have one on set to help prepare to enter the world of the ochi.
“I (only had) very ugly pictures of the ochi without fur on it. I was like, ‘My god, that’s going to be my co-star?’ But it looked kind of cute eventually.”
As the movie prepares to hit theaters this spring, Saxon hopes The Legend of the Ochi’s central message resonates with audiences of all ages.
“It’s really important to let your instincts move you and to take action. I hope Ochi can move through people (in a way) that they become less intellectual, more musical and more curious and aware of the intelligence in nature all around us.”
Add comment