Sasquatch Sunset

I appreciate the challenge of making an engaging feature without dialog in the modern era. The silent era supported them just fine, as the expectation was for performances to be big and incredibly expressive and over-exaggerated, so even the films which eschewed title cards would need little change in approach to get audiences on board¹. What we consider good acting now is much more subtle and controlled and nuanced. When you take away an actor’s voice, you necessarily remove one of the tools they have at their disposal to expand on their character. It’s part of why I often find protagonists who limit their utterances so captivating, such as Dev Patel in Monkey Man or Ryan Gosling in Drive and Only God Forgives (long before he put on the yellow Rollerblades).

And it’s forming a recent trend. In just the last seven months, we’ve had three other American films, each which took a different approach to silencing their protagonists. I haven’t see No One Will Save You² or Silent Night, but I quickly fell in love with Hundreds of Beavers. They span genres, too: horror, action, and comedy, respectively. Which means in some regards, Sasquatch Sunset has the trickiest task. Not only is it more of an emotional drama whose characters and story must carry you through, but our protagonists are neither human nor real animals (apologies to any cryptozoologists out there), further reducing our innate ability to relate to them. Although being humanoid primates does keep them within the realm of understandability, and lends credence to the social (and anti-social) behaviors they exhibit.

We spend all our time with four unnamed Sasquatches who effectively form a family unit. I’ll refer to them as Alpha (Nathan Zellner), Dad (Jesse Eisenberg), Mom (Riley Keough), and Son (Christophe Zajac-Denek). We follow them as they wander through the Pacific Northwest over the course of a year, encountering other wild animals and signs of humanity’s encroachment. Their ultimate goal is simply survival in a world that looks less and less familiar, and has robbed them of all other companions.

It’s shot through with a deep sense of sadness, not only because it’s impossible to conceal Eisenberg’s energy under any amount of makeup and prosthetics, but also owing to the isolation and images which foreshadow coming doom. We see Dad off on his own, staring into the middle distance or admiring a butterfly. Mom seemingly resigned to this nomadic life, dedicated to ensuring her child survives in a world hostile to him. Alpha surly and horny all the time, leading to conflict with the others. All the while engaging in rituals which lend them a relatability, such as regularly calling out to any fellow Sasquatch who might be listening via coordinated drumming on the massive redwoods which surround them, constructing makeshift shelter for the night, and burying the dead.

For a long chunk, probably the first half of the film, there is no sign of human beings. There are only gorgeous shots of the tree-covered mountains and the wildlife contained within. But slowly, humanity’s presence makes itself felt despite us never seeing people. It begins with small signs which indicate someone was here, graduates to the appearance of infrastructure and machinery, and culminates in a deceptively simple yet incredibly poignant final shot which comments on humanity’s paradoxical relationship to the wilderness.

Most of our time is spent watching these wild animals be wild animals, in all that entails. They mark their territory with urine, defecate both in a display of dominance and for use as a makeshift weapon, and vomit on themselves without feeling the need to clean up. We’re treated to many views of the needle-thin Sasquatch dong (both flaccid and fully erect), as well as constantly being confronted with Mom’s primate breasts. At one point, we watch breast milk flow through Sasquatch fur as Son greedily drinks. At another, we see Mom’s water break with a comical “sploosh”.

All of which serves to question what we find objectionable on screen and why. In many ways, this movie is no more gross than Immaculate or The First Omen or Founders Day, with their visceral violence and excessive usages of blood and viscera. Yet only this movie has been the subject of reports of people walking out due to disgust. All are parts of life, the bodily functions on display here even more so as they don’t require exceptional circumstances to make an appearance.

If I’ve been making this sound like a through and through serious drama so far, please know that’s more a symptom of my writing style than the movie’s approach. While it is very low-key and contemplative, doing the slow cinema thing of taking so much time as to force you to think more deeply about what you’re seeing, it’s a deeply silly film. They are, after all, animals. They jump and grunt and hoot and holler. They scratch themselves then smell their fingers and recoil in disgust. They fall off things, taunt skunks, and just generally display an incredible sense of play at all times. The bodily fluids I mention above are often used for comedic effect in various ways, as are the ever-obvious genitalia. Most never rise above a small chuckle, but it’s enough to keep the surface tone light, especially through the summer, even as events and subtext get slowly heavier.

The performances are pretty uneven. Eisenberg and Keough are asked to do the heavy dramatic lifting, and they’re both more than up to the task, communicating so much with simple looks and body language. We feel like we can read their minds. But where all four fall short is when they’re asked to play more wild. Their humanity bleeds through in their movement style whenever they engage in behaviors you might expect from actual apes, especially if we see that shot in a wide angle. For example, when we pull back to witness them such as raging in confusion after stumbling on the gravel road, it almost feels like human children pretending to be gorillas on the playground. That most of us have seen such animals in the zoo gives us solid grounding to compare the technique and notice how it’s not quite animal enough, which took me out of it a little bit in some of the bigger moments. Fortunately, the majority of the movie is smaller, so it didn’t ruin the overall effect.

This is an incredibly strange film, juxtaposing the beauty and crassness of nature, and using it to comment on our relationship to it in ways both specific and broad. It asks us to think about ourselves and how we fit into that puzzle, as well as the consequences of our actions. To really help rewrite our thinking, it presents it all from a unique viewpoint which removes humanity’s privileged perspective for one in which nary a human being is in sight, despite the ample evidence of their existence. Not only that, but by doing so with a creature for which there is no evidence, we’re forced to think about how they can move so invisibly through the world, while people can’t help but leave things behind. All in a movie in which we see Riley Keough shit in her own hand to throw at a bird, despite the many rocks surrounding her.

Ah, the magic of cinema!