Sasquatch Sunset (2024) Movie Review: After reading enough film criticism from varied sources-–or simply talking to many people about the subject—you may, now and again, come across a particular disclaimer for certain movies: “You have to be in the right mindset to fully appreciate this one.” Fair enough; sometimes, a bad breakup or even an empty stomach can skew your perspective and make you less receptive to something challenging than you would be on another, more ideal occasion.
“Sasquatch Sunset,” meanwhile, fits a different but no less valid warning: “You have to be a certain type of person to fully appreciate this.” Such a statement isn’t intended as a value judgment—against either those too “uptight” to enjoy it or those “lowbrow” enough to hail it a masterpiece—but David and Nathan Zellner’s film, without question, is the sort that will not appeal to everyone… or most people, for that matter.
The premise is simple enough; so simple, in fact, that the challenge may very well come from mining any depth from these woods at all. The first half of the title “Sasquatch Sunset” is not meant to be taken metaphorically, as the film takes as its subject a quartet of mythical man-apes (played by co-director Nathan, alongside Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, and Christophe Zajak-Denek) as they live through their day-to-day lives. They forage, they hump, they dump, and their curious minds make every day an adventure.
If that plot sounds perhaps too unadorned to sustain an entire 89-minute project, then congratulations; your astuteness surpasses that of anyone onboard the film who presumed otherwise. Aside from the aforementioned adage, another increasingly common label would perfectly fit Sasquatch Sunset: “A short film stretched to feature length.” The only thing more obvious than the fact that the Zellner brothers have elongated a 20-minute (at most) conceit into an hour-and-a-half of grueling theatregoing is the one joke they use to endlessly pad out the runtime.
These sasquatches poop. And they pee. And they have sex… Are you laughing yet? No? Well then, it looks like you’re in for a long 89 minutes! To give the Zellners credit, there is, at the start of the film, an indication that some of their preteen-prime humor might have staying power in small doses; the sasquatches mate like animals and then wipe off the… deposited fluids like bored humans going through the motions. There’s something in there akin to a sustainable joke format, but “Sasquatch Sunset” taps out on anything more conceptual than these humanoids marking their territory after the appearance of the second seasonal title card.
One could easily get the impression that the only reason “Sasquatch Sunset” has been torturously embellished past any reasonable length for such a project is because a short film wouldn’t justify to investors the painstaking makeup work required for this to reach any remote level of success. And once more, to the film’s credit, the makeup work in question is truly astonishing in its detail, completely obscuring the recognizable half of its cast to the point where only their eyes might signal who you’re looking at under all that sticky fur.
To add to what little praise can be doled out here, there is undeniably a boldness that comes with making a feature-length film entirely dialogue-free, reliant only on mise-en-scene, measured grunting, and body language to recount the tale. And sure, you can look upon “Sasquatch Sunset” as a whole and commend the Zellner brothers for avoiding the use of human characters while still assembling some form of loose commentary on their inevitable encroachment on all corners of the natural world. But really, does the presence of an occasional tent or a forest clearing here and there give you any insight into man’s effect on the natural world that you didn’t already get from something more credible… like Over the Hedge?
With all this in mind, you may be liable to think that such vitriolic criticism is unfitting for a film this openly egoless; is a film mainly composed of people in bigfoot suits flinging their excrement at one another truly worth this sort of analysis? To that end, the very fact that “Sasquatch Sunset” even goes the full mile—be it in the runtime or The Octopus Project’s schmaltzy, self-serious score—indicates some desire to be treated as a goofball film with a heart of gold underneath the muck-covered latex.
“Swiss Army Man” is often referred to colloquially as “The Farting Corpse Movie,” but everyone who actually sits down to watch the film knows that there’s more to it than that. With “Sasquatch Sunset,” David and Nathan Zellner have a hard time proving that their genital-heavy vision is worth nearly as much latitude. Or maybe the film just requires the key ingredient to make any nature project more compelling: somebody, get Werner Herzog on the phone.
