Legends are, by their very nature, stories embedded in our cultures, told time and time again until the details become a haze of smoke that envelops the society in which we live down to its very core. “The Legend of Ochi” acts, in that sense, as a willful study in contradiction often seen in modern storytelling; its own legend is one ingrained within the world of the story presented—given the same ancestral weight as a real-life legend—all the while itself being an invention conjured up for the sake of this new narrative.

Isaiah Saxon’s directorial debut is quite adamant about its originality, in fact, utilizing the mythos of the ochi to add credence to a land inhabited by the stories of its residents just as much as by the residents themselves. The irony of this fact, however, is that in purporting to be a bastion of original storytelling,...