Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is out in Park City, Utah, covering the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Scan through our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they go live, and check out our full archives of past editions.
There’s a keen absurdity at the heart of the Zellner brothers’ filmography, and it’s not the one that’s most immediately identifiable. Sure, Robert Pattinson might have been a goober playing second-fiddle to a cute pony in Damsel, but the central conflict was in his lack of self-awareness and — say it with me, folks — his delusions. That self-delusion is also the driving aspect of Kumiko the Treasure Hunter, in which Rinko Kinkuki took the “Based on a True Story” joke from Fargo as gospel and booked herself a ticket from Japan to North Dakota to look for the lost loot central to that film’s plot and found herself lost in the snowy landscapes (that film, of course, was actually based on a true story, as sad as that is). Over the course of their careers, the brothers, David and Nathan, have allowed more outright fabulism into their work — going from Kumiko’s restrained and melancholy style to the Western hijinks of Damsel was a big step — but few things will prepare you for the ridiculousness of their latest film, Sasquatch Sunset.
It’s an evocative title, but unlike a lot of Sundance selections, the title isn’t just some metaphor: It is about a family of Sasquatch who make their way across the wilds of California while foraging, fucking, pissing, shitting, fighting, searching for potential other members of their species and grasping at self-awareness, all in a given calendar year. It’s a strange film, to say the least, but the problem is that it’s not as strange as it could have been, and it honestly slots too thematically well in the context of their other work to really be as interesting as its folklore inspiration is.
Divided into four chapters, each denoting the passing of the seasons, the most successful segment is the first, “Spring,” in which we’re introduced to the four nameless members of this family unit. There’s the semi-aggressive alpha male (Nathan Zellner), who is sexually frustrated and just a little bit too violent; the more pensive planner/leader (Jesse Eisenberg), who tries his hardest to count all of the stars in the sky when he’s laying under their hastily-constructed shelter; the lone female (Riley Keough), who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant; and the oddball (Christophe Zajac-Denek), a short little fellow who talks to his hand – as in a fist-mouth puppet, with the thumb as the lower jaw – and who seems to get genuinely good information from it. The characters are well-rendered, even as they communicate with a variety of grunts and chirps, and the practical effects are fantastic, which I’m sure that thousands of Bigfoot hoaxers will be genuinely envious of. Think the Burton Planet of the Apes (and regardless of what you think of that movie, the effects work and makeup are genuinely impressive) combined with the Sasquatch mascot for Jack Links beef jerky, and you’ll have a decent idea of what it looks like in practice. It unfolds slowly, initially: The actors chew on leaves and groom each other, suggesting, for a moment, at least, a slower nature-doc-like rhythm before we smash-cut to the alpha male and the female doing like they do on the Discovery Channel.
They are, in fact, nothing but mammals, and this is the double-edged sword that jabs at the audience’s expectations while handicapping what the Zellners are able to do here. There are hijinks, almost directly intended to subvert the mystery of the Bigfoot legend (the photographic “proof “of which is directly echoed in one of the film’s first shots, as the Sasquatch family makes their way across the screen, much as if that famous bit of found footage had more of an Abbey Road flair to it), and the first story is almost entirely about that, set fully in the self-contained world of the forest. The alpha male gets haughty after he’s rebuffed by the female and manages to eat some particularly bad fruit and mushrooms after eschewing the leader’s advice, only to get his comeuppance at the hands of a merciless visual pun. We get a good sense of the group dynamics and feel out the established relationships between each of them — for instance, the female takes care of the oddball when he gets a little too fresh with a snapping turtle — and it works incredibly well as a kind of animal sitcom, in which these characters find conflict in their world, and react to the stimuli in unexpected ways. The ensemble is fearlessly committed to their work, and much of Sasquatch Sunset is delightful, even when it gets to the rougher patches, simply because we get a chance to watch them work, fully consumed in their roles, often only able to emote with their eyes or movements.
The deeper problems emerge once Summer comes around before they metastasize and wholly consume the film in its last chapters. I won’t spoil much of what happens, but you can probably imagine some of what happens, though probably not to the extremes your mind might take you to. They do encounter traces of human civilization, of course, and it plays out in practice like an arthouse version of one of my least favorite cliches — the fish-out-of-water, which has left many an otherwise imaginative film flopping about on the dock of our eternal relevance, with our assumed inability to relate to something unless we find ourselves present in it somewhere acting as the knife ready to gut it. The old hoary koan about trees falling in forests feels appropriate here: They do make sounds as they crash to the ground, but if a sapient creature isn’t around to hear it, it might as well have been silent. We’re led to believe that the family has never seen a road before (in an admittedly very funny bit) or that they’ve never raided a campsite (and one imagines that if the Sasquatch did exist, they’d behave like black bears and just raid garbage bins to the point that they’d fuck up their hibernation cycles), and it’s in this that the Zellners reveal the truly withering idea behind their conception of the Sasquatch: They are just smart enough to be able to comprehend complex ideas compared to other primates but are as dumb or dumber than the possums and skunks around them. The reason, it seems, that we rarely see these creatures is that they’re too busy getting killed by various threats, natural and unnatural, rather than out of a knowledgeable subterfuge and avoidance of the hairless ones.
This is where the film lost me, as it becomes a perpetual stream of “saddest things” that Lie-Bot from Achewood would tell to Phillppe to horrify the young otter, with that Zellner absurdity manifesting itself as a kind of jaundiced vision of these characters. It tugs on our heartstrings as it makes us realize their intelligence while flattering us, establishing that our position on the food chain wouldn’t be threatened by the presence of a giant creature like this because they’re just missing that human je ne sais quoi. They’re able to communicate with the creatures around them, capable of making decorative art, and have some kind of genuine connection with the land that we can’t seem to grasp, and yet the magic of their existence is rendered tragic because they can’t count to four without struggling. It often feels like the central delusion at the heart of Sasquatch Sunset is that these characters think that they’re more than plain old animals, with their comeuppances occurring directly after they attempt to assert themselves as such, though it’s joined by another, more abstract, delusion: That of ours for thinking similarly, that some mystical creature could escape the slippery bonds of human self-assurance.