Directors – David Zellner & Nathan Zellner, Screenplay – David Zellner, Producers – Tyler Campellone, Jesse Eisenberg, David Harari, Lars Knudsen, Geore Rush, David Zellner & Nathan Zellner, Photography – Michael Gioulakis, Music – The Octopus Project, Visual Effects – Pretend (Supervisor – Zak Stoltz), Creature Design – Steve Newbern, Sasquatch Prosthetics – Applied Arts FX Studio (Designed by Steve Newbern), Production Design – Michael Powsner. Production Company – Square Peg/ZBI/The Space Program.
A year in the life of a family of Sasquatches living in the Pacific Northwest, which include a male, a female, a child and an elder male. We follow them as they pass through the seasons and deal with birth and death, while searching for others of their kind and puzzling over human encroachment into their domain.
Sasquatch Sunset was the seventh feature film from director/writer David Zellner. Zellner began making films with Plastic Utopia (1997), Frontier (2001), Goliath (2008), and Kid-Thing (2012), before having a critical breakthrough with Kumiko the Treasure Hunter (2014). Zellner’s younger brother Nathan is a frequent collaborator/actor and the two previously co-directed the Western black comedy Damsel (2018). The film is executive producer by director Ari Aster of Midsommar (2019) and Beau is Afraid (2023) fame.
The public fascination with Bigfoot was created by the Patterson-Gimlin film of 1967, a minute-long piece of amateur footage that purports to show a Bigfoot in the wild. It caused a sensation and throughout the 1970s there were a host of Bigfoot films and pseudo-documentaries made for drive-in audiences of the day. Bigfoot took a turn for the family friendly with Harry and the Hendersons (1987). The Bigfoot genre still continues today with numerous entries in the B horror movie field, while the 2010s gave us a number of Found Footage offerings. There have been just as equal a number of Bigfoot comedies and family films, as well as several works that show Bigfoot as a genteel protector of the environment. (For more detail see Bigfoot Films).
Sasquatch Sunset has an incredibly simple concept – a year in the life of a family of Bigfoots or Bigfeet (debates exist in various corner of the internet as to the correct grammatical terminology for a plural of Bigfoot with no clear consensus for either). There are no human characters on screen in the film. Certainly, there are human actors buried beneath the makeup, including some quite well known faces like Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, as well as co-director Nathan Zellner as the older alpha male. There is no dialogue in the film that does not come in grunts. And yet the result produces a quite extraordinary film.
Bigfoot family – (l to r) Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg and Christopher Zajac-Denek
The film apparently had mass walkouts during its premiere at Sundance. All I can say is that that can only have been people that didn’t get it. I watched it by chance – M and I were looking for something to watch and she said to me “Let’s watch that – I like Bigfoot films.” It was a random choice but in very short course, Sasquatch Sunset ended up being propelled to being a strong contender for one of my top films of the year.
There is an incredible simplicity to the film. We watch the Bigfeet in the wild, chewing on foliage, undergoing a strange ritual where they bang trees (apparently a quest for more of their own kind), building shelters to sleep in and the like. We follow every aspect of their lives from sex (yes we even get Bigfoot sex scenes in the early sections of the film, plus one scene after the alpha goes to seek relief using a knot of wood in a tree branch), birth (the Bigfoot female delivers a baby on camera no holds barred) and death (including their quite tender burial rituals). There is little in the Bigfoot life that ends up being spared – we even see the Bigfeet pissing and shitting to mark their territory. It is an incredibly tender, often quite funny film. The makeup jobs that hide the actors are incredibly expressive – we see the various actors looking out displaying pain and confusion where everything is conveyed by their mournful eyes and the facial expressions on the suit.
The latter third of the film has the Bigfeet encountering various aspects of human civilisation. This becomes a sublime Outsider film where we see things that are normal to us through the eyes of the Bigfeet and their confusion at trying to comprehend a cut log or seeing red Xs painted on trees; their incomprehension at finding a road running through the forest; of rescuing a chicken imprisoned in a coop; deducing the purpose of bear traps; coming across a camp and going through the items there, including their bewildered reaction to music after turning on a ghetto blaster. The film appropriately has them turn up in the township of Willow Creek, California, the so-called Bigfoot Central for the USA – their sense of puzzlement that the film goes out on is the perfect touch.
(Winner in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2024 list. Nominee for Best Actor (Jesse Eisenberg), Best Actress (Riley Keough) and Best Cinematography at this site’s Best of 2024 Awards).
