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.