‘So cool': Stranger Things star finds his happy place among the Ochi

Sydney Morning Herald

2 days ago

Having grown up on our screens as the golden-hearted schoolboy Mike Wheeler in Stranger Things, Finn Wolfhard is used to inhabiting an otherworldly realm.He has spent the past 10 years – almost half his life – heading off attacks from the alien forces of the Upside Down dimension. Mostly, he has confronted the unknown on greenscreen: blank sets where the work of computer animators will round out the action.
'They are amazing artists in their own way,' he says. 'But as an actor, you are reacting off nothing.'
What attracted him to making fantasy film The Legend of Ochi, he says, was its hand-made quality. Isaiah Saxon's film, which is screening at MIFF, is also a fantasy about a clash between humans and bizarre creatures, but it is a very different beast. Most of it was shot on location. It is set in the Carpathian Mountains – Count Dracula's old haunt – where the villages, save for the occasional passing car, look very much as they always have, surrounded by mountains covered in thick forest. Here, the foolhardy explorer may encounter the Ochi, which are like large apes with an alien tweak. The smaller Ochi are played by puppets; the larger ones are actors in furry suits.
'I didn't want to go too far from nature,' says Saxon. 'I wanted the audience to see the Ochi as real animals living in a real place.'
For Wolfhard, all this was fantastically old-school. 'I loved the idea of working with animatronics and puppets,' he says, speaking over Zoom along with German actress Helena Zengel, who plays the film's heroine, Yuri. The puppets, he says, required people to operate them; one person's entire job might be operating a key Ochi's ears.
'This was an opportunity to really have this kind of amazing experience which not a lot of people get to have these days,' says Wolfhard, who has been in our lounge rooms as Mike since he was 12, but is still only 22. 'There was a whole team of people piloting the Ochi. And there was something so cool about that because, as they were controlling the puppets, they were the real actors.'
Zengel is 17, but her character is just emerging from childhood, torn between loyalty to her embittered father Maxim (Willem Dafoe) and longing for her mother Dasha (Emily Watson), a mythic figure who left the family under an impenetrable cloud years before. Maxim regularly takes the local boys – his proxy sons, handed over by their fathers for Maxim to toughen up – out on raiding parties. They try to kill any Ochi they can find, then come home for a revivifying wrestle; it's a sort of genocidal version of Scouts.
Wolfhard plays Petro, a hesitant orphan whom Maxim has taken into his home. Petro is repelled by this bloodlust but is too timid to say so; it is Yuri who is the good shot, keen to hold her own among the boys. Until, the day after one of these night raids, she finds a wounded baby Ochi in the woods. The little Ochi looks like a cross between Yoda and a bush baby. Miserable Yuri feels an immediate affinity for it; more remarkably, she discovers she can trill its musical language. She takes it home, bandages it, sings to it.
Loading
'I wanted to centre a kid who felt that her ability to express herself had withered or died,' says Saxon. 'Yuri is shut down and her only outlet is listening to screaming black metal. Then she sees an animal that is an antidote to everything humans are: direct, intuitive, instinctual. What would happen to that kid if that Ochi energy was in her life?'
As it happens – and happenstance proves unusually obliging here, even by the standards of fairytale – she rediscovers her mother, Dasha, now a shepherd high in the hills. You can't befriend an Ochi,' says Dasha. You shouldn't try. 'Look at what we did to wolves,' she spits. 'Turned them into lapdogs!'
This is Saxon's first feature, but he has already carved out a significant career as an inspired music video director, working with artists including Björk and Grizzly Bear; Wolfhard, who recently released his first album, was drawn to the project initially because he was a fan of those clips.
'I have this discomfort with our reliance on language as the primary communication format as human,' Saxon says. The Ochi communicate by merging their emotions through their voices, which are produced by mixing a mockingbird's call and something called a throat whistle. Saxon discovered the throat whistle and its great exponent, Paul Manalatos, when he was trawling the internet. There was Manalatos, warbling into his webcam. Somehow, that's very much in the spirit of the film.
Zengel started acting even earlier than Wolfhard. She was 10 years old when she was lauded as revelatory in the tough 2019 German drama System Crasher, about a frighteningly volatile ward of the state who is passed from one agency to another, all her carers soon admitting she is beyond them.
'I was super young, you know,' she says. 'Back then, obviously I had fun saying these bad words! It was a cool time; I was able to do anything that kids shouldn't do. But I understood what was going on, I understood the topic and I took it seriously.'
Loading
The Legend of Ochi, as a family movie culminating in a clutch of benign messages about tolerance, diversity and the environment, is ostensibly that film's polar opposite, but Zengel notes that it doesn't condescend to younger audiences. Very young children might have eyes only for the baby Ochi, but there is a darkness at the heart of the story that could provoke uncomfortable questions for viewers of any age.
'I think there are adults who might take life lessons from it,' she says. 'It has beautiful side stories that it tells and things that you can project on today's society and today's life. So I think it's a very complex film.'
Wolfhard agrees. 'I loved the script for just that reason. That, yes, kids could watch it, but it wasn't explicitly for children. I think movies made for kids in the last 15 years really try to spoon-feed children and assume they can't take in more nuanced themes.'
Think of a great movie for children: almost everyone goes straight for The Wizard of Oz. 'I watched that as a kid and there's a lot of scary stuff in that movie. But life is scary!' says Wolfhard. 'Oh yes! I was traumatised by The Wizard of Oz!' enthuses Zengel. 'I like when children even at a young age see films or talk about things that are more serious.'
Obviously, the Ochi are standing in for all the real animals that have been hunted or crowded out by humans – wolves, whales, tigers – at the same time as pushing a plea for peaceful co-existence that children readily understand. Closer to home, however, is the film's frankness about families' failings.
Loading
When Yuri runs away, mad Maxim dons some armour that could date back to Vlad the Impaler, gathers his boys and prepares to run his daughter to ground with a rifle. Dafoe's Maxim is ultimately a pathetically vulnerable man, but he's dangerous with it; Emily Watson, as the bolter, is hardly a cosy mother figure. They compare poorly with Ochi parents, who enfold their young in their fur, singing.
The film is also prepared to face the unhappiness of children. As someone who grew up in front of millions of people, Wolfhard has spoken with feeling about how he was unable to explain to anyone, including himself, that he was not enjoying his Stranger Things fame in the way that everyone around him assumed he was.
'When people ask a kid, 'Are you OK?' they'll say, 'yes'. And that means nothing,' he told Cosmopolitan. 'Kids don't want to disappoint anyone. They don't even know if they're OK.' All these kids are unhappy. In the great tradition of children's literature, however, they will find a way out through having their own adventures, away from adult meddling. And, in Yuri's case, with a secret furry friend.