The Zellner brothers aren’t afraid to transform their actors. For Damsel, they took Robert Pattinson and turned him into a suicidal singing incel, while in their episodes of The Curse they helped to change Emma Stone into a truly skin-crawling parody of herself. Sasquatch Sunset, though, is a whole new level for the pair, fronted by an entirely unrecognisable Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg who, as the title suggest, play sasquatches (or Bigfeet, if you will). It’s a bold gambit, creating a truly unique film in which humans are never seen and no lines of dialogue are ever spoken, with results that might outstay their welcome, but are often fascinating.
Keough and Eisenberg’s sasquatches are two members of a four ape clan, Keough playing the one female of the troop while Eisenberg is the beta male of the gang, which is fronted by a gruff and angry alpha male (played by Nathan Zellner) and completed by the young and playful offspring of the alpha and the female (played by Christophe Zajac-Denek). The Zellners’ camera treats this family much as it does all the other creatures of the Pacific Northwest forests, though their proximity to humanity does rob the sasquatches of any of the quiet dignity that the neighbouring deer and mountain lions might have.
Broken up into four chapters, each following a season, Sasquatch Sunset follows a melancholic year in the life of these cryptids. Mysteries abound (are they the last of their kind, the first, the only ever?) but the Zellners commit to never giving answers – all the communication here is done through grunts and wild body language, while the only traces of humanity are through their sparse *stuff*, which the sasquatches sometimes stumble upon.
If you think the above approach might get a bit tired in a full feature-length film, you’d be kinda right. Sasquatch Sunset is only 90 minutes long, but it sort of starts petering out at about the half-hour mark (which, incidentally, is with a scene that would serve as a perfect ending to the short film that this maybe should have been). There are smatterings of beauty and a strange sadness – the sasquatches do seem to be looking for others of their kind – in the later stages but, somewhat inevitably, it all ends up feeling a bit samey as we continually watch the creatures eat, shit, sleep, and get into scuffles.
There’s a lot of gross-out humour here, not much of which landed for me, but did get laughs in the screening I was in, so this is a real ‘mileage may vary’ point. What was most impressive, aside from the loving shots of this gorgeous American wilderness and fantastic score from The Octopus Project, was the sasquatch suits themselves. Sometimes you can see through them to the admirably committed Eisenberg and Keough performances within, but they mostly look like entirely real sasquatches, seamlessly slotting into the natural world. It must have been an absolute nightmare to shoot, but it really does pay off – stick an Attenborough voiceover on it and you could probably sell Sasquatch Sunset as an honest-to-god nature documentary, only with more aggressive urination and erections than the BBC might allow.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 