Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sasquatch Sunset’ on Paramount+, a Deeply Odd Secret-Life-of-the-Bigfoot Comedy-Drama

There isn’t a single word of English spoken in Sasquatch Sunset (now streaming on Paramount+), or any other recognizable language, for that matter. Nope, it’s just ooh-ooh-ooh-AH-AH-AH – with no subtitles – as Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough lead a cast unrecognizable beneath furry ape suits, grunting, hooting and defecating their way through a year in the life of a family of bigfeet (bigfoots?). Pretty much every conceivable bodily excretion gets a star turn in this incredibly weird fantasti-comedy from filmmakers David Zellner and Nathan Zellner (Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter), but does that mean it’s a crappy movie? Let’s find out.

SASQUATCH SUNSET: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A forest idyll. Lush, beautiful, green. And through it walks a family of sasquatches, like, dum-de-dum-de-dum. There’s an elder alpha male (Nathan Zellner), another male (Eisenberg) we’ll call the beta, a female (Keough) and what appears to be an adolescent or pre-adolescent male (Christophe Zajac-Denec). It’ll take a minute to sort them and differentiate one ugly wrinkled face from another. They sit down and groom each other, picking nits from fur. One accidentally sneezes on another, much to its chagrin. SPRING, booms a title card. And spring must be mating season, because the alpha and the female are going at it. The other two stand and watch. An elk grazing on a nearby fern looks over its shoulder like, do you have to do that NOW? But hey, this is nature’s way. And then it kind of isn’t, as the commingling sasquatches finish and amble over to a bushy patch, pluck a few ferns and towel off their nethers. 

We observe as this “family” of missing links roams the woods. They build a shelter out of branches and ferns. They each grab a limb and thump out a rhythm on trees, in musical coordination – it seems to be an attempt to communicate with other sasquatches, but they get no reply. Their existence is a lonely one, although they coexist peacefully with porcupines, badgers and the like. The beta tries to count stars but seems to struggle, like he’s bumping his head on the ceiling of sasquatch intelligence. The alpha picks his nose and licks his finger. They sleep in a pile. They munch on mushrooms and ferns, and drink at the stream. They taste and smell things in examination. There’s a bit where one picks up a turtle and licks it and it latches onto its tongue and it’s a big to-do; when it finally lets go, they pass the turtle around and hold it up to their ears like they’re playing a game of telephone. Odd. So so odd.

Strange, how these humanish creatures experience everything in the world around them with curiosity and a seeming unfamiliarity – it’s almost as if they know they’re in a movie and want to show the audience what they do and how they do it in an entertaining and comic manner. There is a plot, and it begins with the alpha hogging the fruit of a berry bush to himself, and apparently getting high as balls. Then he encounters a puma in an f-around-and-find-out scene. Meanwhile, the child has an imaginary friend he makes out of his hand, using the thumb to “talk” in sasquatchian grunts. The female is pregnant. The beta is a more playful sort. We witness rejected sexual overtures, various rituals that seem to imply intelligence, fish hunting, the rubbing of a sasquatch crotch with sasquatch fingers that are then smelled by sasquatch noses. Eventually, just as we’re getting weary of ape-y antics, they come across what we’ve expected them to come across all along: evidence of humans.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Quest for Fire featured early cavefolk grunting (also without subtitles) their way through a survival story. Can’t watch actors work in furry primate garb without thinking about the OG Planet of the Apes. I’d wager the opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey was a reference — and god help me those ape outfits looked so much like Alf.

Performance Worth Watching: Is it possible to FOIA Eisenberg and Keough’s financial papers to determine if that is, indeed, them under all those prosthetics?

Memorable Dialogue: This exchange:

Beta: “Uh uh uh.” 

Female: “Oh uh uh oh.”

Sex and Skin: This is rated R for graphic crude and sexual humor and violent images – all involving sasquatches.

Our Take: Goofy movie. Quirky, experimental, ambitious. And novel? Yes, for sure. That’s Sasquatch Sunset’s biggest challenge – superseding its novelty. It aims to bridge the gap between poignancy and scatology, but it lacks the material to cover the expanse. I kept leaning toward the screen in an attempt to interpret what I was seeing, and landed roughly here: This seems like a lonesome group, pounding its rhythm and getting no response, traversing territory in search of others like them, existing within our reality’s sasquatch myth, that we so rarely see them because there just aren’t very many of them. A recurring sort-of-joke in which the beta ’squatch struggles to “count” things (and might be too stupid to do so, ha ha?) takes on legit meaning as we watch how the drama plays out, forcing us to consider what “sunset” implies. 

And then, during one of the funniest and most revelatory sequences in the film – the group stumbling over evidence of humanity, and I’ll leave it at that – their response is to howl, and excrete with wanton abandon, out of fear and, apparently, existential concern. I get it, there’s an added layer to the grossout comedy, a layer of self-reflection prompting us to wonder why the human race finds the mere existence of urine and feces to be funny. We aren’t that different from these furry beasts with their junk hanging out in the open, y’know. And yet it may test your suspension of disbelief, frequently.

Whether you’re compelled to endure the silliness and grotesquery here all the way to the end is a different matter. The Zellners direct with a degree of conviction that lures us in, engrossing us in the environment and the actions of the sasquatches, and it’s effective enough that I had to remind myself that there’s no “realism” here, that there’s absolutely no basis for accuracy of sasquatch behavior. (It’s not a documentary, although it takes on some of the observational mannerisms of the form.) Sometimes they’re gross beasts, sometimes they’re Just Like Us Exclamation Point! The gimmick wears thin and the fixation on doodoo and such will be divisive – it’s a bit much – but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t at least modestly invested in the well-being of these beings, at least in principle. 

Our Call: I’m on the fence here, precariously. Curiosity drove my interest in Sasquatch Sunset, but that didn’t necessarily sustain it, even for its brief 88 minutes. But you hardly ever see movies like this get made, and you have to admire its spirit and gumption. So I say STREAM IT, just to see where the Zellners take you.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.