By David Dent
As the latest instalment of the ‘Planet of the Apes’ franchise hooves into view, functioning – in part – to show off the most recent developments in motion capture technology, along come David and Nathan Zellner with a (slightly) similarly themed movie where the forms of the titular hairy beasts are rendered in makeup and costume, not pixels.
Sasquatch Sunset is likely to be the strangest, and occasionally squishiest, movie you’ll likely see all year. Completely devoid of ‘human’ actors, dialogue (except for excitable grunting) and even story, the film follows a year in the life of a family of bigfoot (bigfeet?) as they eke out an existence in the dense woods of Humboldt County, California (incidentally the same location where the infamous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin cine-film of a supposed sasquatch was shot).
The bigfoot clan comprise a male (Jesse Eisenberg, like the other cast, unrecognisable), a female (Riley Keough) and a child (Christophe Zajac-Denek). A fourth, credited as ‘alpha male’ (Nathan Zellner) threatens the sanctity of the sasquatch ‘nuclear’ family; as a result the female becomes pregnant. The creatures groom each other, have sex and play with themselves, interact with other (real) denizens of the woods, and try out the various woodland foodstuffs, some more palatable than others. They also pee and poo with abandon, marking territory as they go.
As a story of survival, for most of the film the viewer is wondering whether the world they are witnessing is prehuman? There is no sign of homo sapiens life and the sasquatch become the accepted bipedal forms. The creatures themselves don’t seem to have inherited any learned behaviour, so their efforts to adapt to their environment – with trial and error – makes up most of the film.
The eventual discovery of signs of human life is a gradual one; the final penny drop moment a touching echo of the denouement of the very first Planet of the Apes movie.
Sasquatch Sunset will definitely not be for everyone but it’s a bold piece of filmmaking, its strangeness enhanced by a soundtrack by Zellner regulars The Octopus Project and tempered by Mike Gioulakis’s stunning photography.
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