Texarkana Gazette

‘Sasquatch Sunset’: A wild, woolly elegy for creatures that never existed

- TY BURR

“Sasquatch Sunset” is either the silliest movie you’ll see in 2024 or one of the most unexpected­ly affecting, but like the meme says, why not both? A year in the life of a family of Bigfoots - Bigfeet? - it functions simultaneo­usly as slow-motion slapstick, a very hairy nature documentar­y and a melancholy portrait of creatures not unlike us as they confront their own disappeara­nce from the Earth.

With no narration and no dialogue beside grunts, hoots and warbles, the movie effectivel­y puts an audience on the same (big)footing as the characters as they traverse the empty forests of the Pacific Northwest looking for food, a warm place to sleep and the company of their own kind. There are four of them: a cranky old alpha male (Nathan Zellner), a matriarch (Riley Keough), a younger male (Jesse Eisenberg) and a kid (Christophe Zajac-denek). The costumes by creature suit designer Steve Newburn are so shaggily convincing that you quickly forget you’re watching human actors, yet the performers invest their characters with soulfulnes­s and something halfway between dignity and absurdity. Which pretty much sums up the eternal Sasquatch condition, if you will, and maybe that of any genetic first cousinsas well.

Is there a plot? If you don’t count life itself, not as such. Our hirsute heroes wander through woods, meadows and rivers with the slightly dazed caution of people wondering where everybody else has gone. Every so often, they set up a ritualisti­c drumming on tree trunks along with a specialize­d high-pitched call meant to travel long distances, followed by long pauses of listening for a response that fails to come. Then it’s on to the next patch of forest.

There’s comedy in their interactio­ns, though, and some primal and universal urges. Specifical­ly horniness: The alpha male is more or less continuall­y tumescent - we all know guys like him, right? - and the matriarch has long since had enough. A scene in which the big fella ingests some hallucinog­enic mushrooms and, in an advanced priapic state, goes off to find something, anything, to mate with does not end especially well. Just pretend you’re watching an episode of “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.” (Note to Zoomers: This was a TV show, back when TVS had only three channels.)

Who’s responsibl­e for this wonderful oddity? That would be Nathan and David Zellner, Texas-based brothers who have collaborat­ed on writing, directing and acting in a series of deadpan independen­t films, among them the Western pastiche “Damsel” (2018) and the marvelous “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” (2014), about a Japanese woman convinced the buried treasure in the movie “Fargo” is still out there, waiting to be found. That reference aside, the Zellner brothers are not the Coen brothers. They’re weirder.

But they’re also capable, at their best, of nailing a tone of combined humor, pathos, eccentrici­ty and wonder, all of which “Sasquatch Sunset” has in spades. It seems exactly right that one of the creatures is played by Eisenberg, normally a notoriousl­y chatty performer; even under the hair suit, one senses a neurotic - and completely understand­able - anxiety about what awaits the character and his clan around the next river bend. Also, the existence of a movie where Elvis Presley’s granddaugh­ter plays a Bigfoot is eithera sign of the end times or a reminder that we live in the greatest country on Earth.

There are no Homo sapiens to be seen in “Sasquatch Sunset” and only occasional evidence of our presence. Yet the overall vibe is quietly elegiac, as if the Bigfeet are aware they’re living in a world that’s no longer theirs that a species that has managed to live out of sight of human civilizati­on is on the verge of dwindling and disappeari­ng unseen, leaving behind only legends, fuzzy home-movie “proof” and bad 1970s pseudo-documentar­ies. The Zellners mourn with poignant lunacy the vanishing not only of an animal that never existed but of our belief in a world where they might have, and with it the impenetrab­le wildness they call home. “Sasquatch Sunset” is a goofball curio touched with genuine sadness. It’s “The Cherry Orchard” of cryptozool­ogy.

Three and one-half stars. Rated R.AT theaters. Some sexuality, full Big foot nudity and bloody images. 89 minutes.

Rating guide: Four stars masterpiec­e, three stars very good, two stars okay, one star poor, no stars waste of time.

 ?? (Bleecker Street) ?? Jesse Eisenberg in “Sasquatch Sunset.”
(Bleecker Street) Jesse Eisenberg in “Sasquatch Sunset.”

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