Earlier today, my four-year-old son excitedly told me about a movie he watched a part of on Netflix called Bigfoot Family. I thankfully missed out on that (for now) and instead got to watch another movie about a Bigfoot family that is definitely not for children: Sasquatch Sunset.
When the trailer for this came out a while back, I remember being interested in it mainly because it featured Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough (along with Christophe Zajac-Denek and co-director Nathan Zellner) in full sasquatch prosthetics grunting for the entire movie, and it was rated R. While the trailer was mainly humorous, the full film is thankfully deeper than just “look at these actors doing sasquatch shit!”
As the film follows this sasquatch family nature-doc style, there are plenty of funny moments, but no amount of humor could sustain a feature length comedy about grunting sasquatches. Instead, you slowly get to know the family beyond just trying to figure out which one is Eisenberg. There’s a dynamic going on that becomes interesting to follow, and the specter of humanity (actual people are never seen, but their presence is clear) adds a melancholy aura to it all.
But many people may come to this film just for the oddity of a dialogue-free sasquatch movie. Those people will likely get bored quickly. The film is certainly amusing, but if you don’t let yourself be taken in by the family’s journey, it’ll make the brief eighty-nine minute runtime feel like an eternity.
The family drama kept me involved, and the overall style of the film won me over. The “nature-doc” description is apt, but doesn’t do the film justice. Sasquatch Sunset is a beautiful film that doesn’t contain a single wasted shot, and the score makes you feel like you’re witnessing a new world.
The visuals and music are so effective that it can be easy to forget that this takes place in the real world, so when the family comes across evidence of humans, like an “X” marked on a tree for logging, or a campsite, or, in what is destined to be the most famous and definitely most disgusting scene in the film, a road, it feels jarring, foreign, and a little frightening.
Of course, the presence of humanity means the end of the world for this family (it is called Sasquatch Sunset, not Sunrise, after all), but it never feels preachy in its environmental message. It’s more of a sad acceptance of what “progress” does to the natural world. What helps keep the message grounded is the often disgusting behavior of some family members. These aren’t perfect beings frolicing in the magical woods. The alpha, especially, does some selfish, gross shit. This doesn’t mean the movie makes the case to justify the extinction of these creatures; it’s just that the film isn’t naive enough to try to present the natural world as perfect or nice. Here, the world is simply presented as a changing one in which a sasquatch can be part of pop culture, but won’t be able to survive actual culture.
The effectiveness of the film is also a testament to the great physical acting of the four performers. The prosthetics are great, but the eyes of each sasquatch are the most telling feature. Keough is the standout, and she’s the true star of the film. She has the most expressive eyes, and I found myself truly concerned for her character throughout. The combination of performance and prosthetics made me forget at times that I was watching actors in sasquatch suits eating leaves, throwing rocks, and beating sticks against trees, hoping to hear from other sasquatches but only receiving silence in return.
Years from now, maybe my son will watch Sasquatch Sunset and appreciate it as much as I do. But for now, he’ll have to get his environmental messaging from Bigfoot Family (though there is a disturbing element to that film, too, since Bigfoot is married and has a kid with a human woman in it). For the rest of us adults, it’s nice that there’s a poignant, but also gross and funny, sasquatch movie out there.
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