PARK CITY, Utah—There’s been a Sasquatch sighting in Park City.
That actually happened: Someone dressed head to toe in a (quite impressive) Bigfoot costume attended the Sundance Film Festival premiere Friday night of Sasquatch Sunset, the new movie by brothers David and Nathan Zellner.
The 2,500 or so festival goers in attendance were also treated—though some might dispute that description—to four more of the creatures on screen. I don’t think the audience was expecting what they were about to see: My God, so much piss, poop, vomit, fucking. There was also a litany of other ghastly bodily functions, fluids, and feral flamboyance that would take too long to keep listing.
To call the film a little out there or strange would be an underreaction akin to saying recent audiences had a muted reaction to Saltburn, or only kinda liked Barbie.
The film follows a family of Sasquatch, and plays with no dialogue. Well, that’s not entirely fair. The furry clan grunts, hollers, wails, and beats their chests to communicate with one another. Played by actors, including an unrecognizable Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg, the creatures legitimately resemble Sasquatch. From the first frame, the hair and makeup is mesmerizing, more impressive as you observe each fine detail—such as the males’ string cheese-sized flopping penises, or the pregnant mother’s engorged breasts.
The reaction to the film has been divisive; you might even call it “hairy.”
There are critics who have praised the surprising humanity in the familial portrayal of… Bigfoots. (Bigfeet?) And, underneath it all is a powerful conservationist message—unexpected, I think it would be fair to say, for a movie with an extended shitting sequence.
At my press screening Saturday, though, a surprising percentage of audience members didn’t stick around to catch that environmentalist lesson. In a cinema that maybe sat 200 or so patrons, about a dozen left soon after the first glimpse of the beasts moaning through a mating session—which is shown to completion and after, when the female wipes off her genitals using leaves.
A second wave of exits began after a major set piece in which three of the creatures perform a ballet of excrement, urinating and pooping in protest of a plot development I won’t spoil. (The grand finale of the sequence: Mother Sasquatch squeezing her nipples to squirt out breast milk in a fit of rage.) From there until the end of the film was a pretty constant cascade of walkouts. Were those audience members scandalized? Did they “get” what the movie was doing by that point and simply had enough? Or were they maybe just bored by this wordless film?
It’s always fun when there’s a little controversy up in the mountains at Sundance, with excited whispers of “did you hear about…” as people walk up and down Main Street. It’s an indie festival! Let’s be outrageous! I’m very curious how the film will play outside of the festival audience.
There’s a straightforward gaze at the family’s carnality that endears you to them, just as much the same animal nature is played for shock, disgust, and even laughs. The headline of Variety’s review of the film praised it for pulling “off an earnest art-house Bigfoot movie.” The Hollywood Reporter, on the other hand, called it “sometimes poignant, sometimes trying.”
It is certainly the only film I have seen in which I witnessed an entire live birth of a baby Bigfoot. Sasquatch Sunset will always have that.
