David and Nathan Zellner’s Sasquatch Sunset prides itself on shock value but doesn’t go nearly far enough.
Brothers David and Nathan Zellner have been indie darlings for years, pumping out a steady stream of respectable low-budget shorts and features for years before finding more widespread success in 2014 with Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter — a “Based on a True Story” retelling of the debunked urban legend that a 2001 Minnesota death was the result of a woman trying to find the money buried by Steve Buscemi’s character in brothers Joel and Ethan Coen’s similarly fictional 1996 “nonfiction” Fargo. Most recently, the Zellners have directed Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone in the acclaimed Showtime dark comedy miniseries The Curse. But Sasquatch Sunset, a dialogue-free mockocumentary that hides established leads under heavy makeup, feels like a big swing even for established creators.
There’s no real way to properly summarize Sasquatch Sunset for a spoiler-free review, in part because of the nameless characters and nature documentary format but mostly because the film revels in occasional dramatic surprises between large stretches of uneventful scenery. The film very much prides itself on being observational, with loosely connected vignettes following a family of four Sasquatch (played by Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg, Christophe Zajac-Denek, and Nathan Zellner) over multiple seasons. There are a few through lines — primarily the pregnancy of Keough’s character and the nagging question of whether or not this family is the last of their kind — but the film is largely disjointed by design.
Feces and fornication and Bigfoot, oh my!
Nature documentaries are by design a format where audiences view sexual and scatalogical content without the stigma and squeamishness (or titillation) that often accompany seeing that same content with human subjects. Sasquatch Sunset takes that as a challenge, packing the film with as much crude humor as possible. The result is certainly not for the squeamish, as evidenced by the headline-grabbing number of walkouts at the film’s festival screenings. There’s gratuitous amounts of sex, nudity, and every bodily function you can imagine. But even if you’re someone with a stomach for crude humor (I’ve proclaimed my love of excess on this site before), the diminishing returns of the film’s comedy start to wear thin rather quickly.
The biggest problem with Sasquatch Sunset is not that it’s subversive but that the subversion quickly gives way to bland repetition. You can only spend so much time on defecation montages before everything starts to blur together. A shorter runtime could have gone a long way here (the Zellners’ 2010 short Sasquatch Birth Journal 2 tackled the same subject and format far more successfully) but the main problem is that most of these jokes are undermined by being placed in a nature documentary. Fictional or not, seeing a Sasquatch poop and reproduce isn’t all that different from the animals we saw poop and reproduce on video in middle school classrooms. Despite so much of the runtime being devoted to shock and shlock, Sasquatch Sunset never actually ends up being all that scandalous.
A few stellar moments offer a glimpse at what might have been.
None of this is to say Sasquatch Sunset is entirely without its merits. There are a few moments of poignancy — much helped by Keough’s performance — that paint a picture of a thoughtful and more intimate film. And the musical contributions from The Octopus Project are delightful. But Bigfoot fans hoping the film’s pedigree will mean exciting new things for the creature’s cinematic representation will have to keep waiting.
The fact this film even exists is admirable. Unfortunately, that’s not quite enough.
Sasquatch Sunset opens in theaters on April 19th. Watch the trailer here.
Images courtesy of Bleeker Street. Read more articles by Brogan Luke Bouwhuis here.
REVIEW RATING
-
Sasquatch Sunset - 4/10
4/10
