There is something insufferably satisfying about David and Nathan Zellner’s Sasquatch Sunset.
From the time the bizarre sasquatch family drama made news for scarring and scaring audiences at Sundance Film Festival, it was destined to become the kind of media circus that overshadowed Beau is Afraid, Skinamarink and I’m Still Here, the Joaquin Phoenix documentary about that time he tricked us into thinking he was a rapper.
There’s a growing number of “hear me out” reviews of Sasquatch Sunset designed to pique the public interest in a way that, when paired with the movie’s unbelievably dumb premise, supersedes basic value judgments. Viewers might wonder if headlines telling them that audiences are walking out in droves set the movie up as a brave failure like The Painted Bird, or an idiotic one, like Cats. The question becomes less whether the movie is actually good, and more whether you can take it.
Which is why watching the unnamed, mute and virtually indistinguishable Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg, Christophe Zajac-Denek and Nathan Zellner himself wander around the Pacific Northwest forest as Bigfoot (Bigfeet?) is so annoyingly refreshing.
Instead of a sanctimonious art school project or beyond-the-pale gross-out challenge, Sasquatch Sunset is actually a mostly competent, heartfelt and touching story about simple humanity. Mostly.
The story itself, at least, is simple. Four sasquatch wander aimlessly through the vast expanses of their mountain home, snacking on wild gooseberries, rotten raspberries and the odd turtle, constructing half-hearted lean-tos and scratching their nether-regions.
There’s a sort of Jane Goddall/David Attenborough/Planet Earth-type zen to it in that sense, like watching elephants crossing the Serengeti, or March of the Penguins’ valiantly humanizing journey of emperor penguins travelling across the Antarctic.
WATCH | Sasquatch Sunset trailer:
Detached beauty
In fact it is something the Zellner brothers themselves identified, as in an interview with NPR where the brothers described their absurdist film as a sort of pseudo documentary with the semi-animal, semi-human Bigfoot holding its centre — an intentional distancing of human and non-human behaviour that lets viewers observe our own qualities objectively.
And there are some stunning moments of detached beauty — a kind of childlike wonder as A-listers, hidden under matted-fur costumes and makeup, labour to accomplish basic human tasks like counting to three, communicating, protecting one another and honouring their dead.
It’s just that they do so while urinating, vomiting, defecating and fornicating at and on each other. Or while screaming at a road that, terrifyingly to them, runs simultaneously in both directions. Those moments of nauseating, off-putting and visually insulting gags are strewn through the movie, and sometimes threaten to sink it.
Almost every time you start to identify with the weird, whooping, furry polycule and find something sympathetic in their big, dumb baleful eyes, the moment is undone by the large one grabbing its genitalia and a piece of wood with a fortuitously sized hole in it before ambling screeching into the trees.
We’ve all seen this before. An almost insulting tendency to connect offensive ugliness with avant-garde art — everything from John Waters Desperate Living and Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers have made this point before, and even cartoons — from Ren and Stimpy and Cow and Chicken in the ’90s to Netflix’s Big Mouth — have made a valiant attempt to create humour with pure revulsion.
Film a ‘labour of love’ for actor
But Sasquatch Sunset doesn’t feel like it opts for weirdness to hide a lack of story.
Some of the Zellners’ best known work before this is their involvement with the video game web series Red vs. Blue and the Gen Z South Park clone Camp Camp. But here, they demonstrate a professional eye.
Actors delving into the post-modern sandbox can be a warning sign that their participation in a film is more to flex their creative CV’s than to deliver an actually watchable finished product.
But the immersive weirdness that Sasquatch Sunset‘s cast endured and created, which Eisenberg dubbed a “labour of love,” feels more or less earned, and necessary, for a group of simian mole-people expressing the basest, and therefore most honest, depictions of connection you can really record on screen.
At the same time, a lackadaisical, airy plot that stretches and jumps between four seasons of a single year gives what would otherwise be a self-serious slog or gross out gag-reel space to breathe.
The series of vignettes set in a seemingly and inexplicably depopulated world do more to build a feeling than a straightforward and wholly cohesive narrative.
Vibes over plot
While there is a story here — almost equal parts heartbreakingly serious and tongue-in-cheek by the end — its style is one of vibes over plot.
Like Clay Jeter’s sparse, pastoral feature Jess + Moss, Andrea Arnold’s road drama American Honey or Kids, the 1995 coming of age drama that propelled Rosario Dawson to fame, Sasquatch Sunset is about pulling off an emotion.
But the exact ridiculous nature of Sasquatch Sunset’s dumb genius is probably best echoed in the 2007 comic Stevie Might Be a Bear, Maybe. The series depicts the titular Stevie trying to figure out if his family and friends have been gaslighting him into thinking he’s a human man instead of, in fact, a wild bear.
The comic itself is no longer publicly available (if you have a copy, my email is open) but the off-putting comedic sincerity of such an obviously ridiculous premise is why it, and Sasquatch Sunset, work. And both of their endings give an absurd take on what it all means.
“You can pretend to be calm or happy or angry or in love, but basically people terrify you. You want to claw them in the face,” another character tells Stevie at the end of the comic.
“They have a million issues you’re supposed to relate with, but you think: why not just be simple? Why not live in the woods? Stevie, this is because you are a bear.”
Beyond the obvious, and confusing, anthropomorphizing, that’s Sasquatch Sunset. A surreal and, on its face, stupid metaphor for loneliness, the human condition and connection — or a lack of it. But the movie’s emotion and depth sneaks up on you. And everyone here looks like a poorly drawn animal.
