On the Trail of Bigfoot: The Discovery
Dir Seth Breedlove, USA 2021 Studiocanal, £14.99 (Blu-ray)
From the documentary company Small Town Monsters comes the initial instalment of a new series of films on Bigfoot, On the Trail of Bigfoot: The Discovery. The “discovery” of the film’s title is an alleged Bigfoot “nest site” located in the Olympic Peninsula region of Washington State, which consists of numerous large nests made up of carefully woven sticks and underbrush. A logger, exploring a remote area of dense, old, unlogged forest, discovered the site in 2016 and brought it to the attention of Olympic Project, an amateur Sasquatch research group. The remote location of the nest site, to the researchers’ minds – and in the opinion of several professional scientists they enlisted to assist with the study – appears to rule out human origin, while the size and intricacy of the woven beds suggest a need for opposable thumbs and some degree of intelligence: all this would seem to indicate the presence of large, semi-intelligent, humanlike creatures, i.e., Bigfoot. And yet, this would not be the first occurrence of a large-scale project of great intricacy (crop circles) or intentional remoteness (the recent spate of monoliths). Indeed, the nest sites may in fact be that age-old bugbear of anomalous research: a wellplanned hoax.
For the most part, this documentary maintains a refreshingly level-headed, sober-minded, dispassionate tone. Director and narrator Seth Breedlove, who also appears on-screen as interviewer, is to be commended for his avoidance of the pratfalls of the many sensationalist Bigfoot documentaries and television shows that litter the digital landscape like so much Sasquatch scat. As is to be expected, the camera work and editing is solidly professional, and there is an abundance of drone footage of the extremely breathtaking wilderness of the Olympic Peninsula. However, the nest site discovery at the centre of this documentary never adequately achieves the level of the Earth-shattering discovery that the filmmakers want it to be. Instead, what viewers are left with is largely what is to be expected from any Bigfoot documentary, whatever its pedigree: science-based ruminations on the potential existence of a community of large ape-like creatures in the dense wilderness of the western United States, and firsthand eyewitness accounts coupled with amateur researchers backpacking and camping with green night-vision cameras, all of them hopelessly chasing after a creature that becomes less tangible with each additional piece of physical evidence poured into its almost invisible trace – a legend that only creeps further into darkness the more we attempt to coax it out into the light.