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. We should really let the Yeti be, shrouded in noble myth and in the stories of hallucinating hikers. But instead at what passes for extremely weird even for Sundance, through four patience-trying seasons, we experience the shitting, farting, rutting, sniffing (self and other), grunting, and wanderings of (spoiler) what begins (but does not end) as a quartet of sasquatches.
Director of photography Michael Gioulakis contrasts their crude existence with striking cinematography. The stunning vistas and a rich pastoral soundtrack evocative of early Fleet Foxes provides what feels like an undeserving uplift of the comings and goings of the beasts themselves as they pass their days through what turns out to be four very long seasons in the mountains. How the running time can be a slight ninety minutes while each season seems to have dragged on for hours at a time remains one of the great paradoxes, an unsolved riddle much like the existence of the sasquatches 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 and confusion in their lives. Beyond the existential, though, the trials of modern living more often result in explosive diarrhea and vomiting among the semi-sentient beasts. Can a joke grow old if it was never fresh in the first place? Another koan to ponder in a forest of trees falling with only hairy beasts to observe. 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. A seat in the middle of one of the Eccles theater’s very wide rows, with a pair of fellow filmgoers laughing heartily at almost every shot kept me in place for the entire runtime. 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.