Sasquatch Sunset

1hr 28mins (15)

“The Sasquatch, aka Bigfoot, is a mythical creature supposedly sighted in remote regions of North America,” said Jonathan Romney in the FT. “No less elusive are Texas-based brothers David and Nathan Zellner who, since the late 1990s, have worked on the fringes of US indie cinema.” Sasquatch Sunset “deserves to be their breakthrough; it is genuinely like nothing else.” Set over one year, the film has four characters: three adult Sasquatches (played by a totally unrecognisable Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough and Nathan Zellner) and a juvenile (Christophe Zajac-Denek). There are no words in the film, only “gestures, grunts” and “chirrups”, but their eyes turn out to be “remarkably expressive as they register lust, bafflement, sorrow, nausea”. And “bodily functions feature prominently: in one priceless scene, the family encounter something new and troubling, and copiously void their orifices in a spontaneous dirty protest”. Moments of such broad humour aside, “the film has a poignant, lyrical spirit”, and in the end reaches “bizarrely transcendental” heights.

Sasquatch Sunset is “camp, crude and profoundly silly”, said Kevin Maher in The Times: “there’s lots of primitive humping”, vomiting and farting. But it’s also “audacious, beguiling and disturbing”, and one of the “most beautifully shot” films of the year so far. The gags seem “refreshing at first”, said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal, but “they get stale quickly. Moreover, since there is no plot and no dialogue, the quirky central idea never takes on any narrative momentum. What might have been a brilliant short subject – at, say, 15 minutes – gets stretched to its limits, and then some.”