SASQUATCH SUNSET |
★★★☆☆
13 June 2024
A movie review of SASQUATCH SUNSET.
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Directors: David Zellner (DAMSEL; KUMIKO, THE TREASURE HUNTER), Nathan Zellner (DAMSEL).
Starring: Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg, Christophe Zajac-Denek, Nathan Zellner.
It must have been tempting to do a fly on the wall faux-documentary. Glad they didn’t. Would have undermined the pathos.
SASQUATCH SUNSET commences with beautiful imagery of a forest. A title card announces spring. We get a year with a family of Sasquatch. At least there seems to be nuclear unit of Alpha Male (Nathan Zellner), Female (Riley Keough), and Child (Christophe Zajac-Denek). There is also another adult, Male (Jesse Eisenberg) – is he related?
Starring: Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg, Christophe Zajac-Denek, Nathan Zellner.
It must have been tempting to do a fly on the wall faux-documentary. Glad they didn’t. Would have undermined the pathos.
SASQUATCH SUNSET commences with beautiful imagery of a forest. A title card announces spring. We get a year with a family of Sasquatch. At least there seems to be nuclear unit of Alpha Male (Nathan Zellner), Female (Riley Keough), and Child (Christophe Zajac-Denek). There is also another adult, Male (Jesse Eisenberg) – is he related?
The make-up effects for the Sasquatches fall between two stools. The look is neither rubbish/do-it-yourself/Michel Gondry enough to be funny, nor DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES [2014] skilful to wow and hold the gaze. Audiences knowing the movie is going to be about Bigfeet, the filmmakers get the sex scene out of the way immediately – otherwise cinemagoers might have been distracted waiting for the inevitable. Alpha and Female wiping themselves down with ferns after an awkward sequence sets the tone for the first half.
There is no human dialogue. Just grunts and animalistic noises without subtitles. The general feelings are conveyed, but viewer curiosity slackens. This needed to have been tighter in the first 30 minutes. I can imagine audiences turning this off. It is easy to tune out. We witness their routines. Their daily to-do lists include foraging and building/dismantling plant life bivouacs. The Sasquatches do not camp in the same place.
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SASQUATCH SUNSET starts scatological, and unexpectedly evolves into the melancholy with a one-two punch of the personal and environmental. The initial gross-out humour is perhaps to grab the attention before the emotional journey. Picking a nose, masturbating, vomiting, farting, sniffing fingers, squeezing fish guts into mouths, trying to fornicate with a piece of wood – you get the picture. The audience guiltily laughs. (Not me of course, I’m too mature!) Might couples, watching Sasquatches smash their own fists together in a form of sign language, get a new cheeky shorthand when one of them wants to initiate coitus? Though you wouldn’t want to ape any of the adult male behaviour in this movie.
Alpha, the patriarch, is kind of a dick. (A sly commentary on too many patriarchs?) Though, when something happens to him, it has a surprising ache. When something happens further to the group, it is wrenching.
At one point we see an “X” painted onto a tree in red. It can’t be from nature. Like a horror flick omen, something leaden drops into the pit of your stomach. Humans are encroaching into their territory. If the Sasquatches can’t take out a mountain lion, how can they deal with humanity? You worry for them. There is so much danger (bear traps, forest fire, logging). When their only weapon is flinging poop, you know these are not the vicious Bigfoot of WILLOW CREEK [2013].
From puerile monster movie to environmental parable. The last shot is quietly damning.
