Sasquatch Sunset
(R) ★★★★ A year in the life of four cryptids
“If a movie ever seemed destined for cult status or ignominy, Sasquatch Sunset is it,” said Jeannette Catsoulis in The New York Times. “Sometimes tiresome” yet “oddly endearing,” the new indie comedy directed by brothers David and Nathan Zellner “mimes the beats of a nature documentary” as it observes a family of sasquatches eating, drinking, fighting, playing, breeding, and roaming around the misty forests of the Pacific Northwest. Four actors, including Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, wear suits of matted hair and impressive prostheses to play the lumbering cryptids, who never speak but “grunt and yowl and gesture with a seriocomic zeal.” Even so, the performances impress, as “little by little, personalities seep out.” From the opening scene, unfortunately, “there’s a lot of sexual and bathroom humor,” said
Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. “Flatulence, vomit, and excrement-flinging all have their moments,” and because the movie has no real plot, such gags “get stale quickly.” Still, “there is poignancy to the film.” The sasquatches beat trees with sticks to signal their existence, then wait in vain for a response from others of their kind. And they become deeply disturbed when they discover signs that loggers are encroaching on their turf. The film wouldn’t attain such melancholy poignancy if it indeed had no plot, said Richard Brody in The New Yorker. “What the movie offers, in effect, are baby pictures of the human race,” the dawning of consciousness in a primate species, one that discovers quickly that its survival is threatened. Much more than an extended comedy bit, Sasquatch Sunset is a “finely nuanced” drama of “outsize” emotional power.