In ‘Sasquatch Sunset,’ actors go wild as shaggy beasts with a lifestyle of their own

Amy Nicholson April 12, 2024

In the wilds of Humboldt County, Riley Keough slouches into view. You wont recognize the movie star. This is the brothers David Zellner and Nathan Zellners wordless marvel Sasquatch Sunset

,

a combination nature doc, silent comedy, survivalist tragedy and, to its four Bigfoot leads, an alien encounter horror show and shes playing one of the beasts.

Inside crepey wrinkles and wiry fur, heavy brows and grubby nails, plodding feet and soft, pale bellies are Keough and her three co-stars, Nathan Zellner as the alpha, Jesse Eisenberg as the beta and

Christophe Zajac-Denek

as the child who occasionally suckles at

Keough’sher

breasts. The only part of the actors you can see under the prosthetics is their pupils. As they mate and fight and groom and sniff and fling poop and feed on whatever they can forage, orange globs of fresh-squeezed salmon roe dribbling down their beards without a whiff of vanity, youre first wondering how the performers feel to be so visible and yet not. Pure freedom, perhaps? Once adjusted to the films unusual rhythms, your attention refocuses on the actual primate characters, especially Keough, the sole female, who occasionally slumps against a tree and stares off into the distance.

What is she thinking?

The movie is divided into four seasons. The first and longest is

s

pring, which takes its time revealing the groups dynamics. The sasquatch do speak, but only in unsubtitled Sasquatchian. Ooough aah! appears to mean something like, Ready go!; the gibbon-esque whoooo-ooop seems more emotionally complex. Mostly, we learn them by studying their actions. The alpha is selfish and sex-obsessed. (

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inematographer Mike Gioulakis treats us to at least a half-dozen glimpses of the limp carrot-thing at his crotch, plus, from the alphas own POV, an arousing rump shot thats just a Brazilian wax away from being in a 90s frathouse sex farce.) The beta is frustrated by his limits

: h

He cant count higher than four. The child talks to his hand as though he stumbled across a drive-in playing The Shining, and the hand talks back, a mystical touch that grates against the lovely naturalism. And the female stares.

What is she thinking?

The score tells us what the animals cant articulate. When theyre content, the music is the kind of airy flutes youd hear at a day spa. As the mood shifts, a noodling electric guitar kicks in and the gang unconsciously assembles into poses that could be on a grunge album cover. When they’re stoned on mushrooms, we hear spacey, wobbly clanks. (Thankfully, were spared the overdone comic relief of going inside their trip;

instead, we just appreciate how Zellners hungover alpha looks even more hungover than Charles Bukowski at his bottom.) At their most nervous any time they discover evidence of mankind, even though actual people remain unseen the sound spirals out into jittery, squealing, inorganic jazz.

Humans are, of course, the aliens, a point th

eat

Zellners underscore when the apes gawk at a loggers spray

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painted tree as if it’s the monolith from “2001.” (That movie clich is

also

overdone, but Ill forgive it because its so apropos.) But otherwise, the Zellners commendably refuse to saddle these Sasquatch with easy, lazy, obvious ideas of how they behave. What do you think the Sasquatch will do when they come across their first paved road? Im pretty sure thats not the response youll find here.

But if Keough stays on her current trajectory and, decades from now, wins a lifetime achievement Oscar, I hope the Academy remembers to include a clip of that scene in her reel. Later, theres an absolutely wrenching moment at an abandoned human campsite that I dont want to spoil at all, except to say theres something resonant in her reaction, in a simple, still close-up that shows us how feeling overwhelmed and confused can, in an instant, turn into rage.

Are we looking for the human in the Sasquatch? Or for the Sasquatch in us? The movie works either way, but in its refusal to hew to a familiar plot trajectory, it holds up a mirror to our own narcissism. Our species is used to telling stories

that are about them, but star us,

: culture-clash fables

that

turn these independent beings into pets or pals or protectors or spiritual gurus. Because our movies tend to follow an arc of learning and growth, were expecting that these animals will share our own exhausting determination to master their surroundings that at some point, in some way, theyll evolve. There are moments when youre absolutely convinced that the Sasquatch are going to discover something fire, the wheel that will put them on a path toward becoming more like us. They dont. Theyre not us. And the movie asks us to let go of the snobbery that not being us means theyre dumb.

Sasquatch Sunset is a stubborn but playful film that leaves a big footprint on the soul. Especially when we catch on that weve been too dumb to grasp their inventions too. One of the first things we see in the opening is all four Sasquatch knocking on tree trunks in unison. Were clueless.

What, a A

re they hunting or something? By the end, weve grasped that this knocking and, more important

ly

, the listening that follows is their form of long-distance communication. Maybe theyre looking for a friend theyve lost. Maybe theyre just looking for anyone who understands.