To save you a few unnecessary clicks, don’t bother heading to your search engine of choice to find out what the collective noun is for “Sasquatch”. Aside from a few speculative funnies (“a syndicate of Sasquatch”) you likely won’t discover anything concrete, as there was only ever thought to be a single incarnation of this mythic and patently American roving beast.
Nathan and David Zellner’s new film, Sasquatch Sunset, doesn’t deliver any further clarity on preferred grammar, but it does offer a dreamlike window on the lives of four modern-day Sasquatch subsisting like unbathed hippies out in the delectably lush wilderness. With their opposable thumbs and humanoid frames, it only takes a little narrowing of the eyes to see past the clotted fur, furrowed domes and flapping pencil winkies to understand that these Sasquatch are being used as avatars to tell a very earthy and human story.
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The film covers a year in the life this tight-knit clan as they munch on the flora and fauna around them, engage in mating rituals that are only occasionally successful, build huts from branches and leaves, and intermittently sound a rhythmic call on the trees lest their be other members of their dwindling species in the environs. There’s no real rhyme or reason to their existence beyond present tense subsistence, but the Zellners have fun by charting some of their natural learning curve towards something like domesticity.
As our Sasquatch cousins don’t necessarily do much to fill their days, there’s lots of detail about bodily functions and, as such, there’s a whole rushing river of excrement, urine, vomit and even a bit of blood. Even as the film adopts a detached, faux-anthropological mode, you do end up forging a bond with this lovable lummoxes, and even though the film leans heavily on gross humour, it’s not at the expense of a bit of heart.
Eventually, as the year winds on and the Sasquatch roam ever deeper into their pristine Arcadia, they begin to see signs of human encroachment: a tent pitched with a full snack hamper and boom box (loaded with 80s club bangers); plumes of smoke rising up from a wildfire; and, most comically, a tarmac road harshly cutting through the tree-line. The Sasquatch’s reaction to the road will be the film’s comic highlight for those with the stomach for it.
Underneath the suits are Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg, Nathan Zellner and Christophe Zajac-Denek, and they all perform commendably due to never letting up on the joke. Yet what make Sasquatch Sunset a cut above what some might perceive to be an extended Funny or Die sketch is that it’s crafted with such care and with a sense of cinematic grandeur, achieved via Mike Gioulakis’ gorgeous, mussy cinematography and the gentle pastoral sounds of The Octopus Project on the soundtrack.
