What's the big hairy deal about Sasquatch Sunset? The Bigfoot movie is dumb, gross and satisfying

There is something insufferably satisfying about David and Nathan Zellner's Sasquatch Sunset.

From the time the bizarresasquatch family drama made news for scarring and scaring audiences at Sundance Film Festival, it was destined to becomethe kind of media circusthat overshadowed Beau is Afraid, Skinamarink and I'm Still Here, theJoaquin Phoenixdocumentaryabout thattime he tricked us into thinking he was a rapper.

There's a growing number of"hear me out" reviews of Sasquatch Sunset designed topique the public interest in a way that, when paired with the movie'sunbelievably dumb premise, supersedes basic value judgments. Viewers might wonder if headlines telling them thataudiences are walking out in drovesset the movie up as abrave failure likeThe Painted Bird,or anidiotic one, likeCats.The question becomes less whether the movie is actually good, and more whether you can take it.

Which is why watching the unnamed, mute and virtually indistinguishable Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg,Christophe Zajac-Denek and Nathan Zellnerhimselfwander around the Pacific Northwest forest as Bigfoot (Bigfeet?)is so annoyingly refreshing.

Instead of a sanctimonious art school project or beyond-the-pale gross-out challenge, Sasquatch Sunset is actually a mostly competent, heartfelt and touching story about simple humanity. Mostly.

The story itself, at least, is simple. Four sasquatchwander aimlessly through the vast expanses of their mountain home, snacking on wild gooseberries, rotten raspberries and the odd turtle, constructing half-hearted lean-tos and scratching their nether-regions.

There's a sort of Jane Goodall/David Attenborough/Planet Earth-type zen to it in that sense, like watching elephants crossing the Serengeti, or March of the Penguins'valiantly humanizing journey of emperor penguins travelling across the Antarctic.

Detached beauty

In fact it is something the Zellnerbrothersthemselves identified, as in an interview with NPRwhere the brothers described their absurdist film as a sort of pseudo documentary with the semi-animal, semi-human Bigfoot holding its centre an intentional distancing of human and non-human behaviour that lets viewersobserve our own qualities objectively.

And there are some stunning moments of detached beauty a kind of childlike wonderas A-listers, hidden under matted-fur costumes and makeup, labourto accomplishbasic human tasks likecounting to three, communicating, protecting one another and honouring their dead.

It's just that they do so while urinating, vomiting, defecating and fornicating at and on each other. Orwhile screamingat aroad that, terrifyingly to them, runs simultaneously in both directions.Those moments of nauseating, off-putting and visually insulting gags are strewn through the movie,and sometimes threaten to sink it.

Almost every time you start to identify with the weird, whooping, furry polycule and find something sympathetic in their big, dumb baleful eyes, the moment is undone by the large one grabbing its genitaliaanda piece of wood with a fortuitously sized hole in it beforeambling screeching into the trees.

We've all seen this before. An almost insulting tendency to connect offensive ugliness with avant-garde art everything from John Waters Desperate Living and Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers have made this point before, and even cartoons fromRen and Stimpy and Cow and Chicken in the '90sto Netflix's Big Mouth have made a valiant attemptto create humour with pure revulsion.

Film a 'labour of love' for actor

But Sasquatch Sunset doesn't feel like it opts for weirdness to hidea lack of story.

Some of the Zellners' best known work before thisis their involvement with the video gameweb series Red vs. Blue and the Gen Z South Park clone Camp Camp. But here,they demonstrate a professional eye.

Actors delving into the post-modern sandbox can be a warning sign that their participation in afilm is more to flex their creative CV's than to deliver an actually watchable finished product.

But the immersive weirdness that Sasquatch Sunset's cast endured and created, which Eisenberg dubbed a "labour of love," feels more or less earned, and necessary, for a group of simian mole-people expressing the basest, and therefore most honest, depictions of connection you can really record on screen.

At the same time, a lackadaisical, airy plot that stretches and jumps between four seasons of a single year gives what would otherwise be a self-serious slog or gross out gag-reel space to breathe.

The series of vignettes set in a seemingly and inexplicably depopulated world do more to build a feeling than a straightforward and wholly cohesive narrative.

Vibes over plot

While there is a story here almost equal parts heartbreakingly serious and tongue-in-cheek by the end its style is one of vibes over plot.

Like Clay Jeter's sparse, pastoral feature Jess + Moss, Andrea Arnold's road drama American Honey or Kids, the 1995 coming of age drama that propelled Rosario Dawson tofame, Sasquatch Sunset is about pulling off an emotion.

But the exact ridiculous nature of Sasquatch Sunset's dumb genius is probably best echoed in the 2007 comic Stevie Might Be a Bear, Maybe. The series depicts the titular Stevie trying to figure out if his family and friends have been gaslighting him into thinking he's a human man instead of, in fact, a wild bear.

The comic itself is no longer publicly available (if you have a copy, my emailisopen) but the off-putting comedicsincerity of such an obviously ridiculous premise is why it, and Sasquatch Sunset, work. And both of their endings give an absurd take on what it all means.

"You can pretend to be calm or happy or angry or in love, but basically people terrify you. You want to claw them in the face," another character tells Stevie at the end of the comic.

"They have a million issues you're supposed to relate with, but you think: why not just be simple? Why not live in the woods? Stevie, this is because you are a bear."

Beyond the obvious, and confusing, anthropomorphizing, that'sSasquatch Sunset. A surrealand, on its face, stupid metaphor for loneliness, the human condition and connection or a lack of it. But the movie'semotionand depth sneaks upon you. And everyone here looks like a poorly drawn animal.