This review is part of Honi Soit’s continued coverage of the 71st Sydney Film Festival, 5-16 June. Read the rest of our reviews here.
Sasquatch Sunset (2024) is the latest feature from Independent director/brother duo David and Nathan Zellner (Plastic Utopia (1997), Damsel (2018)). Produced by Ari Aster (Midsommar (2019), Hereditary (2018)), the film tells the story of a year in the life of a sasquatch family, framed and quadrisected by the four seasons.
Nathan Zellner himself plays the role of Alpha, a brutal, dominating father figure. Riley Keough (Zola, Daisy Jones & The Six) is his nurturing sasquatch wife, and an executive producer on the picture. Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network, The Art of Self Defense) plays a younger teenage-esque sasquatch, and is also credited as a producer while Christophe Zajac-Denek plays the baby of the bunch.
The film opens on gorgeous shots of the North Californian wilderness. Aerial and landscape scenes that ground the film in the lush scenery of Humboldt County, Northern California —a real-life hotbed for sasquatch encounters, and a principal theater in Bigfoot mythology.
As such, nature is an important device throughout the film. The rules of the wild are clearly — sometimes, brutally — apparent and typical narrative conventions are thrown to the wind. We, as an audience, are not given many obvious cues for interpretation. The sasquatches never speak in anything but grunts. But the directors and cast do a fantastic job teasing out the communications and rituals of this furry, humanoid group.
The film is singular. We have never seen anything quite like it before, with elements of body horror, slapstick comedy, dystopia, and even, melodrama, a multi-generic mish mash that makes for an incredibly entertaining ride.
The spine of the movie is the tension between the sasquatch and humanity. Bigfoot, as America’s greatest folktale is a missing-link type of figure that perhaps represents humanity’s faint connection to nature and industrialisation. Though we never explicitly see humans in the film, their influence is disturbingly apparent. Long, foreboding shots of human artifacts like smoke, bear traps, and trees marked for logging, make this parallel clear.
At its best, Sasquatch Sunset is a nuanced portrait of family, nature, and human conflict, with many nods to sasquatch mythology. A sweeping year in the life of these rare and mysterious creatures, acutely aware of their situation as potentially the last of their species.
There are moments of real gravity. The deafening silence of the Redwood forest as they beat out a greeting to other sasquatches and wait for a response. Riley Keough shines in these moments, even with the lack of dialogue, as her character reflects on single motherhood, mourns the death of her sasquatch brethren, and contemplates the extreme vulnerability of her position as perhaps the only surviving sasquatch female.
There are genuine, laugh out loud moments, but a large portion of the humor comes from the sheer unbelievability of the situations the directors present.
At times, the film feels crass and unpolished. The volume and intensity of gross-out body humour and shocking moments leave little to the imagination and can feel more absurd than compelling. The Zellners seem to want to explore the complexity of this missing link figure, or an evolved wood ape that sits between prehistory and humanity on the evolutionary spectrum. But the characters vary so frequently and suddenly from polar opposite ends of this spectrum it’s almost jarring. [SPOILERS AHEAD, skip to the next paragraph if you want to avoid] One minute they mourn and enact complex burial rituals. They are creative and curious and weave and make attempts at basic math. And the next, Alpha (played by one of the Zellner’s) gets drunk off a fermented berry bush, pesters his ape-wife for sex, tries to fuck a stick and destroys his nest, runs away, farts, eats a mushroom, trips, spews, tries to rape a mountain lion and then fucking dies!
The original soundtrack, produced by electronic trio The Octopus Project, is pertinent in selling the emotional beats of this dialogue-free film. In one important scene, rising electric guitar licks uplift the atmosphere, exciting the audience as the camera ascends with its subject to an epic vantage point. These guitar accents, complemented by rhythmic acoustic tones and soft choral support, add real emotion and atmosphere to the film.
In an interview with the BFI, the Zellners expressed their desire to explore sasquatch life beyond the scope of the usual sighting clips — 15 seconds of a furry, bipedal creature wandering across the screen. But, the film seems to work best when it emulates this formula. When the camera pulls back and its subjects are allowed to fade into the background. When we, the audience, are forced to sit back and observe these mysterious furry, humanoid figures wandering across the American wilderness and wonder at their emotion and subtlety from afar. And it flies when the cast are allowed to soak in their dramatic beats.
But when the camera gets too close, or the lighting too bright, the mystery fades a little. The effect of the costumes and makeup, for the most part a brilliant effort led by makeup director Steve Newburn (Pacific Rim, Beau is Afraid), fades and we, the audience, are reminded that these are only actors in well-crafted costumes.
This movie is certainly not for everybody. Not everyone will appreciate the sheer volume of body humor the film uses, and not everybody will be patient enough to reach the little pieces of brilliant filmmaking the Zellners manage to deliver in between.
But if you can buy in, and embrace the utter awkwardness of Sasquatch Sunset, you’re in for an absolute treat. This was absolutely one of our favorite movies this year. Totally unique and a definite contender for newest cult classic.
