Overview
In the misty forests of North America, a family of Sasquatches—possibly the last of their enigmatic kind—embark on an absurdist, epic, hilarious, and ultimately poignant journey over the course of one year. These shaggy and noble giants fight for survival as they find themselves on a collision course with the ever-changing world around them.
Sasquatch Sunset is a curiously odd film. Sometimes delivering wry humour, sometimes gross-out comedy, but also hitting with a social commentary on the modern world’s encroachment and destruction of nature, all through the eyes of a family of Sasquatches in the forests of North America.
Almost documentary-like in approach, this is a film with no spoken language aside from the grunts and howls of the family. The first few scenes, showing the group as they wander the forests, occasionally banging a rhythm and howl out as they seek others of their kind in this lost wilderness, before comically engaging in pastime activities, initially made me chuckle at the absurdity of it all. Somewhere under the rather decent prosthetics were Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, although trying to discern who they were was difficult, but not really important. As the film settled down into a more sombre tone, as the family progress through the wilderness, and start to encounter perils along the way, the film began to lose me. Broken into chaptered seasons, we see the group over the course of a year as they melacholically come to realise that they are alone, and their group is set to get smaller and smaller, with only the imminent arrival of a newborn offering any hope.
This all sounds deep and meaningful to some degree, and indeed there are moments in which the group come into contact with aspects of modern man, offering a chance to assess how we have ravaged and destroyed the natural world. But it is also in these moments that the film lost me with some unnecessary actions from the family that soured any serious approach the film could have taken. One scene in particular, at around the mid point, when the group encounter a road is so ridiculously crass for no valid reason that it marked the point where I was pretty much done with the film.
Crass, gross and juvenile at times, the balance with the more serious points the film is trying to make simply doesn’t work, and the end result felt like a dull mess of ideas that might have fit well into a short 20 minutes, but instead forcible stretches to just under 90, breaking any attention, and making for an uncomfortable watch for a multitude of reasons.
Some interesting ideas, but sadly tarnished by the mixed approach to delivery, that makes it hard to take serious, but is too pondering to be fun.