Producers: Richard Peete, Traci Carlson, Isaiah Saxon and Jonathan Wang   Director: Isaiah Saxon    Screenplay: Isaiah Saxon   Cast: Helena Zengel, Willem Dafoe, Emily Watson, Finn Wolfhard, Raazvan Stoica, Carol Bors, Andrei Antoniu Anghel, David Andrei Baltatu, Eduard Oancea, Tomas Otto Ghela and Eduard Ionut Cucu   Distributor: A24

Grade: B

The baby beast rescued by a determined girl in Isaiah Saxon’s oddly affecting fantasy might look a lot like Gizmo the gremlin, but there’s a goodly amount of E.T.’s DNA in the cute little critter, especially since the plot, about the child’s effort to return it to its home, shares the narrative through-line of Steven Spielberg’s classic.

But though it’s set in the 1980s, the decade of both those films, and shares with them a reliance on practical effects, including some amazing puppetry, the locale is very different—Carpathia, an island somewhere off the coast of Romania in the Black Sea.  The place is rendered, though a mixture of location shots and matte paintings, as a rustic throwback but with a mystical aura—beautifully rendered in Jason Kisvarday’s production design, Elizabeth Warn’s costumes and Evan Prosofsky’s cinematography—where the local population shares space with a species of simians called ochi.

The cohabitation is hardly friendly, however.  The humans, mostly farmers, look upon the nocturnal ochi as dangerous, even murderous.  Their folklore depicts the creatures in horrifying terms as rapacious killers of farm animals, and sometimes of people too: one local, Maxim (Willem Dafoe), blames them for the disappearance of his wife years ago. So his neighbors have understandably given him their blessing to hunt down the creatures and exterminate them.  To that end he’s recruited from neighboring families a group of boys to be his private army, trained and led by him and his second-in-command, an orphan named Petro (Finn Wolfhard), whom he’s raised as his own son.  Maxim also has an adolescent daughter named Yuri (Helena Zengel), but he relegates her to the job of checking the traps set for the beasts.

Yuri doesn’t share her father’s blind hatred of the ochi, and mourns the absence of her mother.  And when she finds an injured baby ochi on one of her nighttime inspections, her instinct is to carry it home and see to its wounds.  Though it appears cuddly, at moments of fear it can bare a set of sharp teeth.  Yet noticing a caterpillar in a wildlife case Yuri has in her bedroom, it treats the insect with delicacy.  Yuri responds by inserting some plastic vampire fangs in her mouth in an effort to bond.

All is going well until Petro hears the critter and bursts into Yuri’s room.  But the sensitive lad can’t bring himself to fire his rifle, and the girl takes the opportunity to flee with the ochi through a window.  She’s determined to take the ochi back to its tribe, though Maxim has never been able to discover exactly where they hide during the day.  His response to the news is to call his hunters together to chase down his daughter; he dons a rusty old suit of knight’s armor and, like a mad modern Don Quixote, jumps onto his all-terrain to lead the way.

Yuri, meanwhile, carries the ochi through an episodic odyssey that includes, among other stops, a wild comic interlude in a supermarket with a slapstick ride in a grocery cart and the theft of a car as its frustrated owner looks on.  Accidentally bitten by the ochi, she slowly heals in the forest and awakens to the realization that she can communicate with the critter, understanding its repertoire of screeches and squawks and being able to employ them herself.

And the duo stumble upon something she’s always longed for.  They find a reclusive shepherd, Dasha (Emily Watson), whose real identity will come as no shock.  But her purpose might: she’s made a life’s work of studying the musical nature of ochi language, and at a critical juncture the magic flute she’s constructed to replicate its effect will play a decisive role.

Yuri’s reunion with Dasha is not free of friction, but their overcoming it will have to wait: Maxim’s arrival sends the girl fleeing again.  Ultimately all will be resolved in a magical setting: a warren of caves that can be reached only through a subterranean lake.  There the confrontation of Maxim and the leader of the ochi ends with a resolution proving their common love of their children.

“The Legend of Ochi” sometimes stumbles—Paul Rogers’ editing is occasionally off (the supermarket sequence, for instance, is rather a jumble), while Dafoe’s manic intensity is at times overbearing and Watson’s diffident air can feel affected.  Wolfhard is underused, given little more than the opportunity to play awestruck surprise.  David Longstreth’s score, like John Williams’ famous one for “E.T.,” can be overbearing too, though overall its soaring strains make a similar impact.

But ultimately Zengel’s marvelous turn as a determined tomboy, catching every change over the course of Yuri’s journey, and the amazing animatronics, resulting in creatures with such tactile immediacy they actually seem real, carry Saxon’s debut feature over the rough spots.  This is an impressive act of cinematic imagination, bringing a world as recognizable yet fantastic as anything in the Grimm Brothers’ fables to vivid life while filling it with warmhearted human emotion.

Producer: Rupert Majendie   Director: James Griffiths   Screenplay: Tom Basden and Tim Key   Cast: Tom Basden, Tim Key, Carey Mulligan, Sian Clifford, Akemnji Ndifordyen, Steve Marsh and Luka Downie   Distributor: Focus Features

Grade: B

Most expansions of short films stumble; this one doesn’t.  It’s based on a genial twenty-five minute two-hander, “The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island” (2007), written by its stars Tom Basden and Tim Key.  (You can find it on YouTube.)  Basden and Key have added some new characters and songs to the mix and filled out details, but remain the leads, and director James Griffiths returns as well.  The result, “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” is as charming and quirky as the short was, if a bit overextended.

The basic setup is the same.  Charles (Key), a goofy, pun-loving chatterbox who got rich playing the lottery, hires songwriter-singer Herb McGwyer (Basden) to come to his mansion on an isolated island for a private recital.  It turns out that the performance will be for an audience of one.

In the short film, that was it: the astonished Herb eventually sang his songs on the beach, accepted his huge fee and left, having developed a curious bond with lonely Charles.  Here, McGwyer is a guy whose star has faded ever since breaking up with his partner Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) nearly a decade earlier.  (The duo split when he decided to do a solo record.)  He’s accepted Charles’ offer of half a million pounds for the gig because he needs the dough for a new album.

What he doesn’t know is that Charles has also invited Nell, hoping to get the one-famous duo together again for the recital-on-the-beach.  And when she shows up, she brings along her husband Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen).  The reunion is initially uncomfortable, but gradually the singers come to forgive what they perceive as long-ago slights and start playing again.  All seems to be going nicely until Herb makes the mistake of presuming too much.

The character of Charles is also considerably fleshed out.  He’s a widower whose late wife Marie was, as shown in one newspaper clipping, was a “superfan” of McGwyer Mortimer; they traveled together to see them live over and over.  Using his wealth to recreate those experiences will be a tribute to Marie and a means of recapturing, in some small measure, the bliss he enjoyed with her.

Charles is also given a potential new romantic partner in Amanda (Sian Clifford), the proprietor of the little convenience store on the island.  He clearly has a nice rapport with her, but it will take intervention from Herb to arrange an invitation for her to join Charles at the solo recital he ultimately gives on the empty beach.

Basden and Key have clearly refined their characters over the years, and they now play them like a comfortable old vaudeville team, and Griffiths gives them free rein.  While Basden has the less showy role, the straight man as it were, he captures the hangdog reality of Herb’s current situation, and has some hilarious moments, as when he runs out of change for the payphone in the booth outside Amanda’s shop, or slips on a tray of food Charles has left outside his room.  (The songs he’s written aren’t bad, either, though we hear them mostly in snippets.)  Key, though, is the sparkplug of the piece, and his habit of saying and doing whatever springs into his head, however unsuited to the moment at hand, gives him ample opportunity to play the amiable buffoon, at once irritating but lovable.  Mulligan is nice, and adds a pleasant voice singing harmony in some duets, but her essential normalcy makes Nell a more dramatic than comedic force. Ndifornyen proves a strong presence in a sharp moment with Herb toward the close, but the decision to send him offstage for much of the story on a bird-watching tour, while allowing for the McGwyer-Mortimer bond to warm up, is a weak contrivance.

On the other hand Clifford is a delight, evoking smiles whenever she appears; a bit about Nell’s trying to buy some peanut butter cups at her store is totally extraneous but delicious.  (One wishes some room had been found for scenes including her son Marcus, played by Luke Downie, who appears briefly in that scene.)   She even pulls off the late sequence at the beach concert, when the repeated shots of Charles’ sad face as he recalls Marie during Herb’s songs can feel mawkish.

One can, in fact, get the feeling that Basden and Key struggled to expand their script to full feature length.  Some of the conversations are repetitious, even when the dialogue is engaging, and some sequences, like a tennis match (or even that peanut cup moment) don’t seem to add much, however enjoyable they might be in isolation.  Oddly, given that expansiveness elsewhere, as staged by Griffiths and edited by Quin Williams, the ending comes across as a mite rushed.

And yet there’s so much low-key, rather twee charm here that it’s churlish to quibble overmuch; the rapport that Basden and Key create might be thought of as a much gentler, more quintessentially British version of the bond that Steve Martin and John Candy forged in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.”  And while the film is obviously a fairly low-budget affair, cinematographer G. Magni Ágústsson captures the striking beauty of  the craggy cliffs of coastal Wales, standing in for Wallis Island, especially in the beach scenes, while production designer Alexandra Toomey and costumer Gabriela Yiaxis don’t prettify the place.  Adem Ilhan’s evocative score complements the visuals—and the movie’s mood—nicely, and works in tandem with the songs.

This isn’t a frantic world-beater of a comedy; it works more in the style of Bill Forsyth’s “Local Hero” as a genial, understated, warmhearted fish-out-of-water story (although in this case the outsider spends a good deal of time in the water, be it the sea or the rain).  And it brings to the attention of American audiences two talented British comics who, though they’ve been working together as members of the quartet called Cowards since 2004, may still be new to them.