‘Sasquatch Sunset’ Review: Hard to Believe the Zellner Brothers Could Pull Off an Earnest Art-House Bigfoot Movie
20.01.2024 - 06:35
/ variety.com
Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Austin-based indie directors David and Nathan Zellner have spent more time thinking about Sasquatch than most filmmakers do musing about human beings. In 2011, they brought “Sasquatch Birth Journal 2” to the Sundance Film Festival, a four-minute faux nature documentary in which a hirsute creature can be seen giving birth to an equally furry infant.
Thirteen years later, the siblings return with “Sasquatch Sunset,” a one-joke feature that leaves the amateur videographer gimmick behind, committing itself to tracking a year in the lives of a Sasquatch family of four — let’s call them Big Foot, Mama Foot, Tender Foot and Buster (the runt of the litter). In case you were wondering, the joke is that the film exists at all … because who would finance, much less star in, an 88-minute portrait of these apocryphal brutes? The late-arriving punchline comes with the end credits, when the names Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg appear beside blurry photographs of Mama and her sensitive, tree-hugging son, followed by a list of 25 executive producers.
Top of that roster: Ari Aster, whose artistic partner Lars Knudsen was chief enabler on this highly eccentric project — which is admirable for the absurdist earnestness with which it was created. Fun fact: Every year, at least a dozen Bigfoot movies are made, most of them either horror movies or crackpot docs.
Few if any register with the general public in what amounts to one of the nichest genres (one that lends itself to low-budget movies, given the shaky-cam Patterson-Gimlin footage that started it all). Amid such meretricious competition, “Sasquatch Sunset” seems poised to become the most popular live-action Bigfoot movie since “Harry and the
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