While Sasquatch Sunset isn’t Harry and the Hendersons (and sorry, but that’s the only other Bigfoot movie that comes to mind), it certainly is a Zellner Brothers film. Like Kumiko the Treasure Hunter (2014, solo created by David) or Damsel (2018), their latest effort is completely idiosyncratic in the way it plays with audience expectation and genre. Yes, it features Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg, Christopher Zajac-Denak, and Nathan Zellner in full body hair and strenuous make-up as a family of Sasquatch walking, screwing, and surviving in the wilderness. That’s the story. But as one-note as the idea sounds, Sasquatch Sunset also manages to be marginally complex in revealing the universal emotions of the nuclear family.
I typically hate writing plot synopsis, and thankfully, there’s not much to type here. At a brisk 96 minutes, we’re immediately immersed in the environment of these four creatures. They grunt and innately understand one another. There’s a dominance between them with Nathan portraying the “father figure”, whose needs seem to be eating and chasing after the female played by Riley Keough. Most recognizable beneath the layers of latex is Jesse Eisenberg, whose usual mopey stance provides the perfect sense of teenage disassociation his sasquatch seems to deal with every day. The youngest of the group, embodied by Zajac-Denak, shines with the most personality due to his child-like curiosity that gets most of the laughs, such as when a turtle latches itself onto his tongue during a river feeding hunt. But each one is given an underlying warmth that slowly makes us care for them.
As the four traverse around in the woods (charting the four seasons of a year), Sasquatch Sunset barrels through the same wonderment… the same fixation on survival comfort…. and certainly the same danger that any human would encounter along the same route. Savagely funny one minute and then drenched in pangs of sorrow the next, Sasquatch Sunset gets most of its mileage out of the eyes of its actors. The obvious touchpoint of the film is that we’re all the same on this spinning rock of consumerism, environmental breakdown, and the consumption of poisonous mushrooms, and those eyes say everything. We want the best for our families, and so do this troupe. And the scene where they discover a concrete road is one of the funnier things I’ve seen so far this year.
Sasquatch Sunset opens in the Dallas/Fort Worth area on Friday April 19th.
Dallas Film Now. 