Movie Review: Sasquatch Sunset

2024 is shaping up to be a year filled with unique and memorable movies from filmmakers who aren’t afraid to take huge risks, and Nathan and David Zellner’s Sasquatch Sunset may be the most unique, memorable, and risky of all of them (so far). It feels as if you’re watching a documentary about a small group of Sasquatches over the course of one year, with no narration or dialog, aside from the creature’s primitive grunts and yowls. The style, tone, score, and frequent doses of crude humor wouldn’t be out of place at a 1970s Grindhouse theater, where it would likely be a word-of-mouth hit.

The film opens in Spring, which sees the alpha male (Nathan Zellner) and the female (Riley Keough) devote a good deal time to mating as they traverse the beautifully shot Redwood forests of the Pacific Northwest. Each night the group, which also includes another male (Jesse Eisenberg) and a child (Christophe Zajac-Denek), assembles a makeshift shelter from fallen branches and each day they disassemble it and move on to a new location, which handily explains why evidence of their existence is so hard to come by. The alpha male inspects and tastes any food they come upon before the others are allowed to consume it, which one day leads to him consuming some toxic berries and a poisonous mushroom and then rampaging through the woods in a drug-induced frenzy before meeting a tragically absurd end.

Now alone with the other male and the child, the female must take charge and tries to teach her companions about survival as they hope to run into more of their kind. It is a lonely existence, with their isolation really hitting home whenever they bang sticks against the towering trees hoping for a response that never comes. As the seasons advance, their situation grows more precarious when it becomes apparent that the female is likely to go into labor and they encounter more and more evidence of man’s encroachment into nature.

This is a leisurely paced movie, broken up by moments of slapstick comedy and spilled effluvia. Despite the heavy doses of crass humor and the barebones plot, the Zellner’s still manage to pull a good deal of sadness from their story. The Sasquatches are endearingly pitiable in their simple-minded natures and their upset at the desecration of their world is fully understandable, even if it is expressed in grotesque fashion. For all of its outré silliness and gleeful shock, Sasquatch Sunset is ultimately a story of a single mother struggling to keep her family safe in a world that is being inexorably changed for the worse by outside forces, a fear that feels very real in today’s world. Some viewers will love this movie and some will hate it, but I don’t think any of them will be able to stop thinking about it. ★★★★