Sasquatch Sunset
A fun and bizarre film about a nomadic sasquatch family that doesn’t quite hit the mark or find a coherent theme.
Full Disclosure: I knew next to nothing about this movie going in, aside from the fact that Jesse Eisenberg was involved as a star and producer, and that it was a movie without dialogue about a bunch of sasquatch (I’m just going to determine that the plural of sasquatch is still sasquatch for the purposes of this review, even though I keep wanting to change it to something else in my mind – sasquatches? sasqueetch? sasquati?). It’s always a bit exciting going into a movie never having seen a trailer or knowing anything about a film. It also means there are no expectations to fulfill or disappoint.
Review
Sasquatch Sunset is a film about a group of four nomadic sasquatch over the course of a year, as they experience life, death, and everything in between. Without any dialogue at all for the entire 89 minute runtime of the movie, we’re left to decipher everything they’re thinking through actions or the grunts and noises they make to communicate with each other.
Eisenberg, co-star Riley Keough and the directing team of brothers David and Nathan Zellner deserve a lot of credit for creating something new and original, and also undertaking the difficult task of trying to make a feature film without dialogue. But let’s make this clear upfront – this is a very weird movie. The majority of the time, what we’re watching, aside from beautiful nature scenes from the California forests, consists of the sasquatch grunting, fucking, puking, waving their dicks around, smelling, eating, or pissing on things. So, while the themes (if underdeveloped) and goals of the movie are laudable, ultimately the film doesn’t always hit the mark.
Three of the sasquatch, looking confused, as they do for much of the movie, and right before they inevitably decide to piss and shit because of it.
One persistent thought I had while watching, likely during one of the numerous scenes involving an explicit exploration of a sasquatch’s bodily function, was that this probably could have worked better as a short film. While there are a few notable themes that are covered over the course of the movie, I’m not sure that the story warranted a full feature film.
The themes, such as they are, revolve around the difficult lives of an endangered species, and human encroachment on nature. The film is divided into seasons, and with each new turn of season, the sasquatch bang branches in a certain rhythm onto giant redwoods to see if they get a response. It seems their constant movement and nomadic lifestyle is tied directly to a desperate search to find more of their kind.
I’m giving this movie a 6.4/10 because I like to reward originality in moviemaking, but honestly, it’s probably not really quite that good.
Spoilers Ahead
The one I’ve dubbed “the hedonist” right after puking up some poisonous mushrooms he couldn’t stop himself from eating.
Things start to go wrong when the first sasquatch dies. Since they have no names, I took to mentally referring to the sasquatch respectively as the Hedonist, the Romantic, the Mother, and the Boy. The hedonist, as his reviewer-appointed name would suggest, is only interested in eating and fucking. When this gets him into trouble with the others, he’s temporarily driven off, only to come across a cougar that he – you guessed it – wants to try to fuck. This goes about as well as you might expect, and the others later find the cougar still gnawing on his corpse.
This is also an example where the themes get a little lost in the film. Presumably a film about endangered species, the movie sometimes undercuts those themes by playing scenes for humour. While this scene is kind of funny, most species who have survived to this point have survival instincts that would prevent them from doing things like trying to fuck a growling cougar. So in this case and in a few other scenes, the danger to the sasquatch mostly seems to be that they’re idiots.
The next to go is the romantic, so dubbed because he’s constantly doing things like trying to count stars or gaze inquisitively at butterflies. Shortly after the death of the hedonist, the group begins to come across evidence of human beings, the first being a large red “X” painted on a tree. Soon, there’s more evidence of logging activity, including a massive cut log that’s floated down a river. The romantic jumps up and down on it for fun a few times, it shifts, he falls, gets trapped under it, and drowns. I have to say, the moments leading up to this are actually fairly tense. We can tell that something bad is about to happen, but we’re not sure which sasquatch will suffer the turn of fate.
That leaves the mother and her son, who we’ve discovered is also pregnant (I guess some of that earlier sasquatch sex had a purpose). They come across more and more evidence of humanity, including the worst campsite of all time* (more on that in 5 Quick Hits), where the mother’s water breaks and she gives birth in the most graphic way possible. If you happen to have “see a sasquatch mother give birth in as explicit and disgusting a way possible” on your Bingo card, go see this movie.
The three continue to wander, searching for more of their kind to no avail. They face more hardship, this time largely caused by humans, and the baby survives a crib death scare (or whatever the sasquatch equivalent of a crib is), but all they find in their quest is the slow and steady encroachment of humanity. Ultimately, it’s a melancholy story about loneliness and longing.
Riley Keough’s mother sasquatch. Despite not speaking, she was surprisingly expressive with her eyes.
5 Quick Hits
The music is done by The Octopus Project, a band I’m not familiar with, but seem to be in a similar vein to a band like Explosions in the Sky. Apparently, they’ve worked with the Zellner brothers before. I love when instrumental experimental rock groups are used for soundtracks. It’s something a bit different from your standard sad or stirring strings arrangements. More of this please.
It took me a while to be able to tell the different sasquatch apart, so I’m not sure who the father of the baby is. There is a clear scene near the beginning of the mother and one of the others having vigorous sex, that I suppose we’re meant to assume is the origin of the baby, but because it’s early on, I couldn’t tell at the time if the father was the hedonist or the romantic.
*The worst campsite of all time. At one point the sasquatch come across a campsite with a tent left wide open, and food just lying about, with nothing secured or hidden. This is supposed to be in the middle of the forest, but no one who would make it that far into the wilderness would ever camp that way. The sasquatch unsurprisingly destroy the campsite, but even if they hadn’t, it would have been torn apart within minutes or hours by any number of other wild animals. It made me suspect that the Zellner brothers have never actually been camping.
There’s a scene at the end that brings into focus the idea that as much as sasquatch are creatures of mystery and myth for us, we are the same for them. It’s an interesting minor theme in the story.
Credit has to be given to the actors for what must have been, at times, an excruciating filming process. I can only image how awful it must have been to be trapped inside those stinky and sweaty sasquatch costumes for hours on end. That’s some serious dedication to their art. So kudos to Eisenberg, Keough, Nathan Zellner, and Christophe Zajac-Denek.
