“Sasquatch Sunset” (2024) is a year in the life of four sasquatches starting in the spring and ending in the winter. As they cross isolated areas, they look for food, are innately curious, and engage in simple pleasures, but they also navigate some danger with mixed results. The Zellner Brothers (David and Nathan) directed it, and David wrote and starred in the alleged action, adventure comedy. This film appears to expand their earlier short film, “Sasquatch Birth Journal 2” (2010).
Sasquatch is an anglicized version of sasq’ets, which means hairy man in Halkomelem language, a First Nation people in British Columbia. The film has no dialogue so the four characters do not have names, but they have personalities. Nathan Zellner acts as the most gender normative male sasquatch. He judges everything and every living being on how it benefits him. Can he eat or mate with it or will it help him do either? If it does not, he reacts with brute force and is the biggest of the four. Unfortunately, being the biggest sasquatch makes him overconfident and foolish, which puts him in precarious situations. He is probably the only one who has the benefit of sleeping with the only female in the tribe.
Riley Keough depicts the only female sasquatch. Occasionally actors will show their prowess by choosing characters without an ounce of attractiveness, but every actor in “Sasquatch Sunset” wears a seamless costume that makes it hard to distinguish any of the actors from each other until they have been on screen long enough to get used to their personalities. Like Emma Stone in “Poor Things” (2023), Keough plays a female character who received no training on female gender norms. The female Big Foot has confidence in her physical strength and may be the most contemplative of the bunch. She is most aware of their mortality because of her role as the bringer of life. She already has a still nursing child, whom Christophe Zajac-Danek plays, and monitors her reproductive cycle, which Zellner’s character mistakes for masturbation and pesters her for mating since he gets lucky early in the movie. For anything other than copulation, she spends more time with her son and the forager expert, whom Jesse Eisenberg depicts.
Eisenberg’s character is the most curious of the bunch. He connects with other species and enjoys playing with the child but is also a bit of a sad sack as the only male who is not getting any. This forager may be closest to archetypes about nice guys who cannot get the girl when there is more macho competition. When he thinks that he has a shot, he offers food and other offerings to win her over with no luck, but the tribe’s woman still prefers to engage in practical team survival activities with him than Zellner’s sasquatch, who is often useless or volatile.
Her son seems to be more like Eisenberg’s character and is showing early signs of inquisitiveness but has his father’s gift of getting into trouble. Even though none of the characters speak, he uses his right hand like a puppet to conversate with like an imaginary friend, which further shows that these creatures have a rich inner life and communicate.
A lot of people classify the movie as if “Sasquatch Sunset” is a nature documentary. If it is, it is observational with no narration, but it feels like a movie with a carefully constructed narrative in which each character goes on an individual journey which has an impact on the collective. The sequences of the majestic, awe-inspiring natural landscapes may also contribute to this desire to elevate the movie to something with the veneer of objectivity instead of a constructed product.
In the beginning of the film, the Zellner Brothers show the land, and the four are barely discernible but are visible as specks always walking in formation. The general routine makes sense: walk forward to look for food, savor the food, set up camp, hit trees with big sticks to make a booming noise to call others of their kind, sleep, dismantle the camp and repeat. Any departure from this routine leads to danger and gradually the group’s number dwindles.
“Sasquatch Sunset” tries to dispel any notion that nature does not understand that it is on the verge of collapse. As they keep marching, the signs of humanity encroaching into nature appear, but they still move forward instead of turning around until they reach civilization and still encounter no one, which was an interesting creative choice that never quite worked since the mythology of Bigfoot is spread through all the sightings. It felt like a missed opportunity that despite the four being resilient wanderers, they did not have their own legends about humanity or response to people gawking at them. The final scene alludes to this phenomenon but falls short. For a movie with a lot of imagination and characters with a penchant for exploration of new experiences and a desire to interact with other species, it seems like a huge omission.
“Sasquatch Sunset” is called a comedy because of the scatological way that the sasquatches protest the threats to their existence by literally expressing themselves. It is an act of futility and rage that does nothing to alter the inevitable arc to destruction. Just because characters rut and grunt does not make it feel like a comedy so if you are going for big laughs, you may find them. If you want to be depressed, then this movie is for you. It is a cleverly disguised treatise against humanity destroying nature thus themselves and examines the human condition by observing humanoid cryptids who are simplified versions of homo sapiens. Their follies are ours, but the simple pleasures are too and how both add up to a life, and that life matters regardless of how rudimentary it is; yet it is being destroyed while being theoretically admired or fetishized. Their story is ours, and it is not pretty.
On the other hand, “Lord of the Flies” feels like a universal story, but upon closer examination, it was shocking to realize that in real life, a similar incident happened, and the community of six shipwrecked Tongan Catholic boys did not devolve but survived on an island for a year. While there may be no such being as these hairy creatures, they are useful primates to project a specific identity on to and make it universal. It is hard to imagine existence outside of one’s fishbowl so naturally some American sensibilities are going to stick. There is no such thing as an alpha in a wolf pack, but because of the observer’s identity politics, anthropological fictions were invented that affect society today and appear in this film. “Sasquatch Sunset” is entertainment, but it is also part of this broader picture of how the majority centers itself and makes itself the rule while ignoring other possible experiences that they are observing and misinterpreting.
The Zellner Brothers deserve kudos for experimenting like their onscreen subjects, but it probably says more about the filmmakers’ sensibilities than an imaginary species. If it gets people to stop the destruction of natural resources, then give them an award, but it is important not to forget that it is a European American story, not one from the indigenous perspective who also share the same mythology.
