When you make a specialized movie, you will need to do a specialized press tour. For David and Nathan Zellner’s Sasquatch Sunset, the duo and their actors had to make their rounds on Bigfoot Truther podcasts, of course, to promote their subject. They were immediately entering hostile territory. Was their absurd comedy about Sasquatch making fun of the subject? Did they take every precaution to factor in what the Bigfoot Community believed to be true about Bigfoot? Was their movie going to advance or reduce the aims of getting the truth out there and how did they ensure that this movie, full of crass Bigfoot body humor, would please groups who are very serious about this? A delightful press tour for any outsider and probably an excruciating one for the bizarro community of specialized podcasts the crew found themselves on. Talking Strange Paranormal Show? Check. Sasquatch Odyssey-Bigfoot Encounters? Oh yeah, this is a topical delicacy. The host of the latter, while humbly admitting the film is having some fun, also wants to know if they did the job right, did they vigorously research Bigfoot and get the accurate representation down? You begin to wish the press tour were exclusively these paranoid paranormal podcasts that devote their entire show to mythical creatures. It’s like entering a new meta-level of surrealist press junkets, wherein you must defend the unreality of your Sasquatch comedy movie. These shows are at least as vital as the movie they are about.
A year in the life of a pack of Sasquatches plays out in Sasquatch Sunset, which presupposes that we accept that these creatures just exist and do not need to suspend any disbelief to watch them play their lives out on the screen. It’s divertingly funny, sometimes arriving at puerile gags, because what else are you going to do here besides delve into scatological humor and Bigfoot reproductive behaviors? You’ll want to have a feces-flinging alternate reality wherein it is normal to make this kind of movie. You do not need to excuse or introduce it in this timeline.
Much like Barbie (2023), Sasquatch Sunset is at play with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)’s opening segment — we might agree that anything invoking man’s creation myth is now referencing this point, as a necessary point of shared understanding — but here, we’re doing something else entirely. What if the same scene played out but there was never any evolution — nay, what if the subjects were stagnant and acted as monkeys on and on, and we never cut away and the film bared witness to our most primal instincts, without any idea that it would change? Instead of progressing into a sci-fi world, we stay grounded in the reality of this nomadic Sasquatch tribe and are presented a year in their life, nature documentary style.
This is out-there enough to find the right people. The people who were going to watch a dialogue-free Sasquatch movie with crude humor are going to be the people who will find this movie. They are so open to that possibility that we must believe they’ve already seen it. They were drawn to the movie’s opening week. This movie is a lifestyle choice for the right kind of cinephile. You’re either living that life or you need a recommendation and the latter will be harder to come by.
The funny thing about the movie is to get notable actors and then to hide them in these costumes. Do they give notable performances? With their bodies? With their eyes? Are they good at playing Sasquatch? It’s all just funny enough to watch anyway, as Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Christophe Zajac-Denek, and Nathan Zellner play out their Sasquatch dreams. It’s all so strange, it feels like an extreme example of the kind of roles an agent would avoid, where you’re unrecognizable, it adds little to your name or resume, and the film is just bizarre enough to feel like an aside to any career. As such, you’ve kinda got to respect the choice.
The Sasquatch is a product of video myth-making already. It exists, not because there is a truth to the legend, but because we have cameras and they can capture an alternative truth. Our imagination of the Sasquatch may go back generations in some necks of the Pacific Northwest. Still, it’s the Patterson–Gimlin film (1967), a source of much-contested video evidence that a Sasquatch can exist. There are other reasons why we invented the Sasquatch myth, often as a form of regional self-defense (please do not go look around in our woods), or as a means of keeping outsiders away from insular communities, or as warning signals — stay in your territory for hunting or maybe “the Sasquatch” will get you, or someone will… but the movie just sort of allows the creatures to live and breath and just tries to find all the situational comedy that would come from that situation. It seems they’ve explored the full extent of how that would go in a basic comedic way.
The film will not create further Bigfoot Truthers, probably. Maybe? It might. Less formal exercises have in the past. Okay, but it’s not going to fill you with a new passion for the subject. You’re either already in or already out with this one. The way you come into this movie, what beliefs and wants for the subject you bring with you, will predetermine how you feel about what happens on-screen. It’s a fun thing but there’s not much here to dig into. Just relax and let go: What Would Bigfoot Do?