‘Sasquatch Sunset’ Review: Big Feet and Small Brains

If ever a movie seemed destined — nay, designed — for cult status or ignominy, “Sasquatch Sunset” is it. An initial glance suggests the kind of entertainment that emerges from late-night, bongwater-scented dorm rooms; yet surrender to its shaggy rhythms and you’ll find this sometimes tiresome portrait of a family of mythical beasts is not without intelligence and a strangely mesmeric intent.

Set in a North American forest (and filmed in the California Redwoods), the movie wraps four dauntless actors in layers of matted, gray-brown hair and impressively molded prostheses. Thus disguised, they lumber through a year of mating, childbirth, death and discovery, unburdened by names or lines of dialogue. To communicate, they grunt and yowl and gesture with a serio-comic zeal that earned my reluctant admiration. It must have been murderously sweaty inside those suits.

Little by little, personalities seep out. The alpha male (Nathan Zellner, who co-directed with his brother, David Zellner) is grumpy, aggressive and disruptively randy, courting furious rejection from the group’s sole female (Riley Keough). Her preferred partner (Jesse Eisenberg) is a gentler, more thoughtful soul, as is what appears to be their son (Christophe Zajac-Denek). Predators and poisonous fungi threaten the unwary, but these hirsute hillocks are mostly a danger to themselves — as the alpha will learn when he seems bent on visiting his lust on a hungry mountain lion.

A sincere gift to Bigfoot believers or a surreal cinematic prank, “Sasquatch Sunset” mimes the familiar beats of the nature documentary. This may be a one-joke movie, but it’s an oddly endearing jest, the beasts’ resemblance to primates tweaking our empathy. Even as their infantile, often disgusting antics become tedious, the film’s tone shifts from daft to tenderly melancholic as signs of human encroachment on their habitat multiply. The contents of an unattended campsite — especially a cassette player and a mirror — prove transfixing and unnerving; a paved road provokes the evacuation of every available body fluid. It’s a revolting sight, but also a touching one. We can see they’re terrified.