“Sasquatch Sunset”: big feet and small brains
Jesse Eisenberg
If ever a movie seemed destined — nay, designed — for cult status or ignominy, “Sasquatch Sunset” is it. An initial glance suggests the kind of entertainment that emerges from latenight, bongwater-scented dorm rooms; yet surrender to its shaggy rhythms and you’ll find this sometimes tiresome portrait of a family of mythical beasts is not without intelligence and a strangely mesmeric intent.
Set in a North American forest (and filmed in the California Redwoods), the movie wraps four dauntless actors in layers of matted, gray-brown hair and impressively molded prostheses. Thus disguised, they lumber through a year of mating, childbirth, death and discovery, unburdened by names or lines of dialogue. To communicate, they grunt and yowl and gesture with a serio-comic zeal that earned my reluctant admiration. It must have been murderously sweaty inside those suits.
Little by little, personalities seep out. The alpha male (Nathan Zellner, who codirected with his brother, David Zellner) is grumpy, aggressive and disruptively randy, courting furious rejection from the group’s sole female (Riley Keough). Her preferred partner (Jesse Eisenberg) is a gentler, more thoughtful soul, as is what appears to be their son (Christophe Zajac-denek). Predators and poisonous fungi threaten the unwary, but these hirsute hillocks are mostly a danger to themselves — as the alpha will learn when he seems bent on visiting his lust on a hungry mountain lion.
A scene from “Sasquatch Sunset.”
Zellners’ four-minute film, “Sasquatch Birth Journal 2,” played at the Sundance Film Festival, highlighting the brothers’ inclination to cast a serious eye on patently unserious material. Since then, they have continued to treat preposterous stories — “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” (2015), “Damsel” (2018) — with disarming gravitas. This time, they’re ably assisted by the marvelous cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, who, in films like “It Follows” (2015) and “Old” (2021), has shown particular skill in giving a sublimely unsettling patina to ridiculous ideas. Here, his peaceful wildlife shots capture the natural world with a quiet awe, giving the forest a majesty unearned by the woolly dimwits it shelters and whose survival seems unlikely.
Positioning the sasquatches as threatened rather than threatening, “Sasquatch Sunset,” as its title suggests, is an oddball meditation on one species’ decline. Maybe even our own.