Part comedy, part environmental lament, all vibes – Sasquatch Sunset is a very weird, largely gross, yet somehow very charming chronicle of a year in the life of a group of sasquatch, or bigfoots (bigfeet?). Directed by David and Nathan Zellner (2014’s Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter) it follows a family of these apparently mythical beings as they face threat from the natural world and the encroachment of humans on their habitat.
The group of four sasquatch are an alpha male (Nathan Zellner), a pregnant female (Riley Keough), a second male (Jesse Eisenberg), and a child (Christophe Zajac-Denek). Although, you would be unlikely to ever guess that Keough and Eisenberg are in the cast as they’re beneath prosthetics and the sasquatch speak only in grunts and hoots. Their days pass with in-fighting – often because one male or another wants to have sex with the female – searches for food, encounters with other animals, and occasional straying into areas where humans have decimated the forest.
There’s not a great deal more to it than that. Its humour is of the puerile kind, with plenty of farting, vomiting and pathetically wagging sasquatch erections. In one scene, when the sasquatch encounter a road, a sight that terrifies them, they show their distress by taking it in turns to pee and crap all over it. But if there are times when the joke feels rather repetitive, or the screentime stretched a little thin, even at 88 minutes, there is also some well-earned poignancy to it.
It’s very weird, largely gross, yet somehow very charming
The loneliness of the sasquatch life is palpable. With no sign of any others like them, their lives seem fragile and precious, something made quite touching by their own oblivious carelessness with their mortality. When they gaze wistfully into the distance, watching a plume of man-made smoke curl threateningly into the sky, you can read the worry on their faces, even if they do have a look of the last Halloween costume in the shop.
Sasquatch Sunset’s mood sits somewhere between the queasy surreality of Jim Hosking’s The Greasy Strangler and the winsome daftness of Daniels’ Swiss Army Man. It’s easy to see this following in the (big)footsteps of those and acquiring its own cult following.
In UK cinemas Jun 14.