Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Nathan Zellner and Christophe Zajac-Denek play a group of sasquatches living life in the wilderness.
If the prospect of watching Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough lark around in the woods in bigfoot costumes sounds appealing, then Sasquatch Sunset is for you.
The unusual dialogue-free film, directed by David and Nathan Zellner, is more like a nature documentary than a traditional feature. We simply observe four sasquatches – played by Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Nathan Zellner and Christophe Zajac-Denek – over the course of a year.
We watch them as they carry out their daily lives – eating, foraging, exploring – and come across dangerous animals and foreign human objects.
With the exception of a couple of key moments, there isn’t much in the way of plot and it can feel quite dull after a while. The film is only 90 minutes long but it feels significantly longer because it seems like a good short film idea stretched into a full-length feature.
How you get on with Sasquatch Sunset will also depend on your sense of humour. If you like gross-out comedy involving all manner of bodily fluids, then you might well enjoy watching these animals wee, poop and have sex. If you don’t, you will find this film disgusting and off-putting.
The story can be funny and enjoyable at times – particularly a cougar encounter and the discovery of a road – and it ends on a poignant note about our impact on the natural world, but these good moments are drowned out by the bizarre nonsense.
It is baffling why big names such as Eisenberg and Keough signed up for such a weird film, especially as you can’t see them underneath their hairy bigfoot suits and prosthetics. However, they deserve kudos for communicating through movements and grunts instead of words and for surrendering themselves fully to this odd endeavour.
Sasquatch Sunset is not designed to have broad appeal – this will work for a specific set of people, while everybody else will be left scratching their heads. Are you on its wavelength? There’s only one way to find out!
In cinemas from Friday 14th June.
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