Sasquatch Sunset (2023 | USA | 90 minutes | David & Nathan Zellner)

After sitting through two hours of the Zellner brother’s long-awaited, dialogue-free, scatalogical feature, I have come to the conclusion that the quotidian existence of America’s favorite hairy cryptozooid is perhaps a topic best left enshrouded in eternal mystery. Through four patience-trying seasons, we experience the shitting, farting, rutting, sniffing (self and other), grunting, and wanderings of (spoiler) what begins as a quartet of sasquatches.

Director of photography Michael Gioulakis contrasts their crude existence with striking cinematography and rich pastoral soundtrack evocative of early Fleet Foxes provides what feels like an undeserving uplift of the comings and goings of the beasts themselves.

Alongside Nathan Zellner and Christophe Zajac-Denek, more familiar actors Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, luckily, are utterly unrecognizable beneath what are admittedly exceptional prosthetics. Hidden beneath fur, behind sagging breasts and guts, and bearing comically small genitals, they traipse through forests, rivers, and snow-capped peaks as the domain of humanity causes perturbation, confusion, and explosive diarrhea and vomiting among the semi-sentient beasts. A cast of local wildlife, especially an especially cool mountain lion who delivers bloody justice, each turn in scene-stealing appearances.

As a “Sundance WTF Experience”, I suppose it served a purpose in bonding an audience in uncomfortable laughter and/or puzzlement. Still, as the time and creatures lumbered on, I wished that I could return to a time in my life before I saw this movie and knew less about these poor doomed beings.

Sasquatch Sunset played in the Premieres section at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival; Bleecker Street will distribute it.