I love when a filmmaker feels like they’re playing a game on ‘hard’ mode. To wit, when they take a premise that, on paper, seems like it could not possibly work but, somehow, it does. Nathan and David Zellner’s Sasquatch Sunset feels like exactly one of these exhibitions. A wordless (but not silent), scatological, slapstick-heavy showcase of slightly shifted nature has no reason in the world to work as well as it does, but it shows it’s heart in the most unexpected way.
If you’re familiar with the Zellner’s work – namely Kumiko The Treasure Hunter (2015) or Damsel (2018), you’ll be well-versed in the structure they use, and the rhythms they employ. Starting from a place of twee absurdity, they draw you in, often through tragedy. They take these strange-on-their-face concepts – a young, deeply sad woman on a quest to find the truth (or a truth) behind the movie Fargo or a man leading around a miniature pony on a quest to find the love of his life – and treat them with deadly seriousness. In their prior films, the Zellners have placed loveable animals – Bunzo the bunny in Kumiko and Buttercup the pony in Damsel – as the side characters. In Sasquatch Sunset, the “animals” are centre stage, and presented as any animal would be in a nature documentary.
Based on their four-minute 2010 short film, Sasquatch Birth Journal 2, Sasquatch Sunset follows a family of sasquatches in the forests of North America (actually Northern California, if the filming location is a clue) as they go through their lives over the course of the year. There are no names for these characters either within the text of the film or in the credits, but there’s a patriarch (Nathan Zellner), a mother (Riley Keough), and two siblings played by Jesse Eisenberg (older) and Christophe Zajac-Denek (younger). Dad glares and asserts dominance and is sex-crazed, but is often rebuked by a tired-looking Mom. Jesse has an innate curiosity and analytic mind, developing counting and showcasing an ability to solve problems in ingenious ways. So too, does Christoph, who develops a bizarre form of wayfinding through communicating with an imaginary friend.
Throughout Sasquatch Sunset, we’ll see the family gather food, mate, build shelters, and traverse their domain. They experience both death, and birth. They develop forms of communication – first primitive grunts and yelps and exaggerated gesturing and then something more complex. They do a performative rhythmic knocking on trees, something that’s consistent with ‘Bigfoot’ sightings and encounters. Eventually the family runs up against the first signs of human incursion on their territory, bright pink X’s spraypainted on trees earmarked for logging. Appropriately sinister music accompanies these scenes, as it does when the sasquatches encounter a paved road, slicing through the woods like a scythe. It’s here that the cryptids fight back in the only way they know how – to expel every possible bodily fluid in an act of childish defiance. Further evidence of humanity, like a campsite and a stereo blasting music that puts the family into a hypnotic trance, feels even more sinister. It becomes abundantly clear that these creatures are facing down an existential threat.
The natural beauty of Northern California, even when we’re watching the cryptid clan shit and piss and fuck all over it, needs no further set-dressing. Mike Gioulakis shoots the land and its inhabitants with deadpan seriousness, even in the face of what could be called silliness. It’s the best kind of silliness and certainly the funniest when it’s played straight ahead. The funniest moments of Sasquatch Sunset are when you forget you’re watching a movie and instead a nature documentary, but something – perhaps a turtle biting a sasquatch tongue and the rest of the family trying to dislodge it – jars you right out.
The main triumph of Sasquatch Sunset, for me, is the expressiveness of the actors even in full body, hairy suits. Though they look similar to one another, their small nuances and subtle looks and gestures make each unique. The construction of the suits, all practical with no garish motion capture like in the newest Planet of the Apes films, are anatomically correct and leave the actors eyes visible, so that their expressions can convey annoyance, rage, despair, and joy. Each of the actors imbue their besuited characters with enough personality that it’s impossible not to see the humanity in them, and that’s the point. Through all the pratfalling, over-exaggerated gesticulation, these creatures have a humanity behind them that make them sympathetic and relatable. It’s crazy to think that I’m writing this about a film that exclusively features actors in furry suits, but that is also the point.
Sasquatch Sunset comes to its charms naturally, and through the deceptively-crafted portrayal of non-humans, teaches us the costs of humanity. Because, like the sasquatch herself, the existential threat in Sasquatch Sunset both threatens us, and is us. These, well, not exactly gentle creatures remind us that as we inch ever closer into the woods, consuming and grinding wildlife and nature under our wheels and soles, we usher in our own slow and agonizing demise.
Nathan and David Zellner’s Sasquatch Sunset comes to theatres on April 19 with a VOD/Digital release on May 11, 2024 from Bleeker Street.
