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It's the second of his movies I'm watching, and they were both so very dark, this one is labeled as a dark comedy, and in a way it is. But it's so dark it stops being funny after a while. The mood becomes so somber that even straight forward jokes pass you by with no more than a shadow of a smile.

His protagonist, (it's very hard calling him a hero - he's so much of an anti-hero that the H word feels weird) is once again looking for salvation, and a short while into the movie he's even given instructions of how he should get it. Of course, it won't be easy for him to follow these instructions but his road to salvation will require that he does follow them.

Acting is first class, even if some of his characters are mere cartoons. So much so we hardly care what happens to them, but those that are flesh and blood are real complex human beings, the way real human beings are.

Bottom line - it's dark, gritty and the salvation it offers is not fully rewarding, intentionally so, but I loved it.

It really is simplistic, even cartoonish in the world it builds, and it's all too often going preachy regarding the modern issue of taking care of the world we live in. A question that wasn't part of the discussion in the ancient world we're supposedly seeing in this movie. At least not in the sense we find it here. But on the other hand, I was surprised by the decent characters created in the movie. It's especially true of the two leading villains that is, Wallis Day as the tormented psychotic Annisia and Robert Sheehan who's very good as infantile genius tyrant Draygan. Matilda Lutz is not showing amazing talent as the title character but she's way better than her predecessor in that role, and I'm old enough to remember Brigitte Nielsen. The end result is surprisingly better than I expected, though might suit better a different target audience.

I'm not stating anything surprising, this movie is called The Legend of Ochi, though by itself that doesn't promise a fairytale. And this movie is a fairytale. It Has the looks of a fairytale, but at the same time it works hard to make us feel like this could be real. The choice of Helena Zengel is at least partly because she doesn't look like a Hollywood star. Nobody looks like a star here, and it's a deliberate choice, which I love.

As a rule It's a story about a girl who's forced to live without her mother, making sure this fate is spared from a wounded baby animal, and how making this happen becomes the most important thing she can think of. It relies heavily on superb performance by Helena Zengel and with the very able support of Willem Defoe and Emily Watson who gets a tiny share of screen time but manages to work wonders with it. The two females deliver a very understated performance, that suits their roles perfectly. Maybe countering the larger than life character played by Willem Defoe. It does have some plot holes in it, but it's beautifully shot and altogether it works and for me, that's the only important thing.