Sasquatch Sunset

Austin filmmaking duo David and Nathan Zellner (Damsel, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter) have come a long way from their lo-fi beginnings, and Sasquatch Sunset just may be their most ambitious project yet. It has to be their most audacious. Case in point: They landed certified movie stars for their tiny indie film and then buried them in heavy prosthetics and head-to-toe fur, and tasked them to communicate mostly in grunts for some real Method shit. That’s chutzpah.

Circling back to their 2010 short “Sasquatch Birth Journal 2,” the weird-ass but genuinely stirring Sasquatch Sunset follows a family of four Bigfoots over the course of four seasons. It takes a while to puzzle out who’s who – remember: there is no spoken language here and everybody looks like a furball. (The prosthetics, created by Applied Arts FX Studio and designed by Steve Newburn, are exceptional.) Eventually you start to pick up the differences (this one’s short, this one’s tall, this one doesn’t have a penis), and then you start to pick up on the nuances in their dynamic. Co-director Nathan Zellner plays the tyrannical pater familias, Jesse Eisenberg a more sensitive soul, Riley Keough the lone female hounded by her horny clan, and Christophe Zajac-Denek her young son, in that in-between place of exploration and neediness.

Featuring a contemplative score by locals the Octopus Project and shot among the towering redwoods of Humboldt County, Sasquatch Sunset offers some of the same draws of a first-rate nature doc – stunning vistas, intimate access to creatures picking nits and other preverbal cooperative behavior, an unprecious attitude about the cycle of life. That gets goosed pretty regularly by a puerile delight in bodily functions. (There was never this much fluid in a Sir David Attenborough joint, that’s for sure.) That high-low juxtaposition is one the Zellners excel at: I cackled with glee at a bit of slapstick with a turtle, felt my stomach revolt at some fish guts that gush like chunky tomato soup, and felt real ache for Keough’s emotionally drained mother. This thing’s a journey, y’all – the miraculous coexisting with yawning boredom. (I mentioned the nits, right?) For all the outréness of its premise, David Zellner’s script is insightful about (not-quite) human nature, and there’s much in the sasquatch daily grind that will resonate – most especially in the inevitability of our obsolescence. Irony, on the other hand, will outlive us all.

Read Richard Whittaker’s interview with the Zellners.