Dialogue is one of the most overrated aspects of filmmaking.
Even in the Golden Age of silent film — during the reign of masters like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd — filmmakers were reluctant to add dialogue cards for fear of slowing the pace of the movie. Sometimes, even when a character was speaking, directors would omit dialogue cards because gestures and visual cues told audiences what they needed to know. Directors Nathan and David Zellner have taken this concept to the extreme in their latest, Sasquatch Sunset, in which characters communicate both comedy and tragedy entirely through grunts and gestures.
Deep in the North American wilderness lives a group of four sasquatches — played by Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg, Nathan Zellner and Christophe Zajac-Denek, all in heavy prosthetics. Over the course of four seasons, we follow them in their daily life as they search for others of their kind. And as their journey unfolds, we see signs of strange creatures in the woods: humans!
A bit of content warning: This movie is very gross. These mythic creatures produce every type of organic fluid imaginable throughout the film’s runtime. One scene became infamous during Sasquatch Sunset’s festival run: Our heroes urinate and defecate aggressively, which sent many viewers running toward the exit. That said, many remaining audience members gave the film a standing ovation when the credits rolled. And the gross-out humor is not without purpose. These moments serve to humanize these fantastic beasts and make them more relatable; after all, we humans all have our moments in the filth. There are fun scenes and various visual gags, including oddball scenes of the sasquatches using things found in nature in wacky ways, or the big-footed apes reacting to human technology for the first time. Some great editing, including comedically timed jump-cuts and long shots, help sell the joke.
While many moments might leave you in stitches, the film might also leave you with a broken heart. Despite being a comedy, Sasquatch Sunset is also very depressing, portraying the negative consequences of human interaction with the natural world. When people go into the forest, they leave it a changed place. From pollution to deforestation, we are disrupting the natural order. As the movie stretches on, the comedy moves into the back seat as the gloomy environmental message becomes more dreary. These moments come off as a punch to the gut — similar to Studio Ghibli films like Pom Poko and Princess Mononoke. It’s an experience that will likely leave you questioning humans as a species and what we are doing to our world.
Sasquatch Sunset is definitely not a movie for everyone — its intense gross-out humor could lose you, and its dark turn has the potential to ruin your good time at the cinema. But those who can get on the Zellner brothers’ wavelength are in for a treat: one of the most odd and unique movies of the decade so far.
