Do you believe in Bigfoot? Sasquatch Sunset does. It’s a 90-minute would-be nature documentary shot as if the big hairy cryptozoological beasts really did exist (but they do!), and follows them on the daily round – from eating and grooming to mating and dying – over the course of one year.
It’s people inside impressive suits, of course, and some of them you will know. The four are Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Christophe Zajac-Denek (who is a small adult and plays the child), while Nathan Zeller, who also co-directs with his brother David, plays the extra male of the pod.
For beasts these sasquatch are quite human. They communicate in grunts, use sticks as tools, stare at the stars at night and try and count them, grieve when there is a death and look awestruck when taking in a mighty view over the forests they call home. But they’re not doing very much with those sticks and don’t seem very bright. It’s possible that these four are the last of their species. In scenes that become more poignant as the film goes on, they regularly stop to bang rhythms out on trees, a call to other sasquatch perhaps?
They have penises, the males anyway, visible ones in the case of the adults, who are in quiet competition for the affection of the sole female. They’re wispy things, like shaved carrots at a fancy restaurant, and occasionally they’re comically erect. These sasquatch also pick their nose, they rub their nethers and have a sniff, they literally shit themselves when disturbed. There’s lots here for the inner eight-year-old.
There are no humans in this movie but their presence increasingly asserts itself. A red cross on a tree marked for felling. A forest fire set by loggers. An empty tent full of tasty treats. And in the film’s final shot, a wooden building whose purpose will probably tickle you.
There’s a worrying early tendency towards anthropomorphising of the sort that used to plague Disney’s films in the 1950s and 1960s, but Zellner and Zellner seem to be using that as a way to hook us in. It abates as the film goes on and the sasquatch are presented more as a species in their own right rather than as stand-ins for human beings.
Whether it needs to be Eisenberg, Riley et al is another question. Of the two adult males I was never sure which one was Eisenberg. And while the beasts’ gait marks them out sometimes as humans in suits – offspring of the sasquatch in Harry and the Hendersons, maybe – the four actors are convincing in little interplays seated on the ground or scuttling about building a shelter out of bracken and branches. They were trained by the mime Lorin Eric Salm, who also taught Eisenberg how to play the young Marcel Marceau in the film Resistance.
I was reminded of a Ukrainian film from 2014 called The Tribe (Plemya), which was set in a school for deaf kids and used sign language throughout. “No translation, no subtitle, no voiceover,” it warned at the beginning. The film (which is great) told its story necessarily in big, bold gestures and so does Sasquatch Sunset. There are goofy moments but there is also a lot of fascinating “information” to be gleaned about these big soft beasts who seem to live mostly on roots and the occasional fish. Jeopardy, when it comes, is gripping. Emotions are high and low, happy and sad, comic and tragic. We get the sense of life lived as it’s happening rather than according to some plan.
And yet, almost by stealth, Zellner and Zellner have inserted an arc into this story. There is a journey beyond the one through the forests in search of food. What starts off as a funny little exercise in what-if turns into something poignant and powerful. As we wave this little family goodbye, we fear for their future.
Sasquatch Sunset – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
