This review is laden with spoilers and other editorial that will potentially sway the opinion of readers. “Sasquatch Sunset” is not a movie for everyone, certainly not for children. What some might find to be abhorrent, others might find to be compelling. This review looks at some possible thematic elements of the film and what they might mean. It’s up to you, the reader and viewer, to decide if it’s your cup of tea.
This movie and this review are not for kids!
As far a quality goes, this is a quality film worth exploring, but not for the faint of heart, squeamish, or those uncomfortable with raw acts in the animal kingdom.
So few movies captivate in ways that “Sasquatch Sunset” can. The movie follows a small family of bigfoot throughout the course of a year. Broken up into four parts, one for each season, “Sasquatch Sunset” tells a story that’s deeper than just watching the remnants of these junior Gigantopithecus gallivant in the forest. “Sasquatch Sunset” is a deep dive into the human psyche and ultimately holds a mirror up to the viewer for them to watch their own self-destruction.
Setting
Where
The location of “Sasquatch Sunset” is primarily in the woods. Indicators of what woods can be found by the types of wildlife shown in the exposition shots and B-roll. Through the film we see; porcupine, skunk, deer, mountain lion, badger, elk, and other animals that are native to North America.
An observation about something that’s slightly inaccurate, the elk and deer pictured during the spring season are shown to be out of velvet. Had this been true to the seasons, they would have still been in velvet.
The forest and terrain are indicative of the Pacific northwest. Large, old growth, trees and a near rainforest canopy are the areas that dominate the film.
At the end of the film, it’s revealed that the sasquatch have been inhabiting an area adjacent to Willow Creek, California. Willow Creek is located in the northeastern corner of the Golden State. The final sequence of the movie shows the Willow Creek – China Flat Bigfoot Museum. In real life, the museum has been in operation since 1988.
The Willow Creek area is alleged to be about 50 miles south of the location where the famous Patterson–Gimlin bigfoot film was alleged to be filmed.
When
It’s not immediately known when the events of “Sasquatch Sunset” take place. Not until more than halfway through the film can we assume the events are transpiring during the modern era. The first indicator of this were red “x’s” painted on trees that were marked for cutting.
Not only does the red “x” give a clue on what timeframe we might be viewing the bigfoot, but also ends up being a foreshadowing tool of sorts. A cut-by-tools log was found by the sasquatch, which ultimately leads to the untimely death of one of the bigfoot. This is something that’ll be explored further on in this review.
The next place we are clued as to when in the modern era the film takes place is when the young Male, Female, and Child come up on a road.
Towards the end of the film, a campsite is stumbled upon. We know the setting is sometime post 1991 due to music that is played at the campsite. Through conjecture, it’s safe to say “Sasquatch Sunset” takes place in the mid to late 1990’s, as to the rest of the gear in use at the site would be anarchistic in comparison to today’s standards – unless it’s all retro in style for whatever reason.
The players
There are five bigfoot who are characters in the film – one of which is a prop. Three adult sasquatch, one juvenile, and an eventual baby sasquatch – essentially a bigfoot doll.
The ending credits of the film do not name the sasquatch.
IMDB names the bigfoot as “Male,” “Female,” “Child,” and “Alpha Male.”
Digging a little deeper, the Instagram page for “Sasquatch Sunset” refers to the bigfoot by some nicknames. “Alpha Male” is still referred to as “Alpha Male.” “Male” is nicknamed “Gentle Squatch” in an Instagram post. A collaborative post between @screenplayed, @sasquatchsunset, and @bleeckerstfilms reference the screenplay and “Male” is called “Young Male,” and the other bigfoot retain their IMDB names. One post calls “Child” “Tween Squatch.”
The roles of Male, Female, Child and Alpha Male are played by: Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Christophe Zajac-Denek, and Nathan Zellner respectively.
“Sasquatch Sunset” was written by David Zellner and directed by David Zellner and Nathan Zellner.
The soundtrack
The musical score that’s used throughout “Sasquatch Sunset” is a mix of east meeting west, in a literal and figurative sense. The Octopus Project provided scoring that resonates the sounds of nuevo Pacific northwest one would expect to hear playing before some folks got around a drum circle. The music is soothing yet upbeat, and has a splash of traditional Cantonese.
Videography
The video work in “Sasquatch Sunset” is superb. Between the use of different points of view, wide and more focused, the film work acts to help tell the story of our bigfoot heroes in this tale. It was sharp, stunning, and brilliant.
Themes
When I got a few minutes into “Sasquatch Sunset” I immediately felt that this is a movie about humans. And not just humans as in the human element, which is included, but mankind as a species as well.
Ultimately, does the story of “Sasquatch Sunset” foreshadow the end of mankind?
As far as the story goes, it follows the bigfoot through the seasons. In the chronology, the story starts in spring, progresses to and ends in winter. The film ending in winter may alludes that the days of bigfoot – man – are coming to an end.
The viewer can deduce that they’re watching the probable final group of bigfoot in existence through the story. At different stages, the group would stop to send out bigfoot calls via the striking of trees with tree branches and their yelps. We learn that this method of communication is effective and how they do send messages over distances. One scene, the Child uses the calling techniques to alert the Female and Male of something he discovered.
The Alpha
The Alpha Male plays a pivotal role in sustaining the community of – at the time he was still alive – bigfoot, by lending his genetic material to the female. The Alpha encompasses almost everything that has to do with carnal desire. When his sexual advances go dismissed, Alpha would respond in anger and aggression, rather than catch on that the Female knows she’s already with baby squatch in the womb.
Sexual frustration
Frustration is something that The Alpha is a solid stand-in for. What happens to man when man is frustrated – sexually and otherwise – and what depths and lengths one will go to in seeking pleasure. The Alpha himself does not take his role as chief breeder seriously as far as the extension of his species goes, but instead keeps the species going simply because he likes to have sex – much like man.
Substance abuse
Alpha dabbles with substances in order to cope with getting the highs he seeks from not being fulfilled in other ways. Some of this pleasure seeking behavior includes eating berries from a bush that made him drunk and subsequently hungover, and eating some magic mushrooms.
Alpha’s dive into magic mushrooms paired with his inability to cope with sexual frustrations led to his eventual demise.
After being denied sexual satisfaction with his advances being turned down, the hungover Alpha attempted to have sex with a piece of wood that was holding up the shelter the others were building. Alpha acted as a physical homewrecker – with the shelter destructing when he pulled the support piece – due to his sexual desires and went off into the woods in a fit of anger. While on his lonesome, Alpha eats a mushroom that makes him hallucinate and he rages through the forest.
The mountain lion v. Alpha’s erection
The Alpha’s fatal mistake is when he stumbles upon a mountain lion and he thinks that he’s able to have it participate by acting out his sexual needs. This is not an undertone, the Alpha has a large red erect penis while he moves in on the lion, whom we don’t see again until later on.
In the battle of who’s going to come out on top, we don’t know if Alpha is successful in having sex with the lion, but we do learn that in the end what happens to Alpha. The lion is found on top of the Alpha eating entrails from his carcass.
Alpha’s death and extinction came because of his abuse of substance, lust for momentary pleasure, and an inability to cope with not having his desires fulfilled.
The young Male
Young Male is a curious squatch. He seems to embrace more of the finer elements of what being a squatch is about, but moreover, has a much larger emotional IQ than the Alpha. This emotional IQ, while very important, does not keep him from his own eventual death.
Higher level thinking?
What kills the young Male? His frustrations in not understanding or perhaps his learning about the deeper things of the world around him.
Young Male has an interest in counting. However, when he counts things, getting beyond a few items, he loses track.
Coincidently the concept of four is slightly lost on him when he counts four eggs, potentially to divide up between the bigfoot. The Alpha’s answer to the young Male’s inability to fully conceptualize how many eggs he has, is to just take them for himself, and or divide them up behind the scenes. It’s doubtful the Alpha shares what he’s taken, as it does not matter how many there are, they’re all his because he says so.
One scene shows the young Male attempting to count the stars. This quixotic concept is not lost on modern man, try we might, but we know we’re unable to fully realize what else is out there.
Technology
Not being able to grasp mathematics and other anomalies frustrates the young Male. One scene where the young Male, Child, and Female encounter a road – something they’ve somehow never run into in their lives – they freak out. Not knowing or understanding what the road is, or where it came from, the group reacts adversely instead of just accepting its existence and moving on.
How does our hair-clad group of heroes respond? By urinating, defecating, and lactating on it to mark it as their territory. Little did the bigfoot know that this thing that’s supernatural to them could not be claimed or tamed. Their inability to understand did not change its existence. They could have crossed the road, just the same, and went on their merry way without trying to impose their mark on an anomaly they stumbled upon. Man has been known to figuratively defecate on that which he does not understand or what vexes him.
The wheel
The young Male’s death comes at the hand of his own frustrations. When attempting to count tree rings on a log that was found, the young Male gets mad. The log, a man made hazard to the squatches, not only represents technology, but we can say it’s almost a stand-in for the wheel. When the young Male fails to understand or harness the technology of mathematics – thus the wheel – he jumps on top of the log.
After repeatedly jumping on the log and it moving, the young Male slips off of it and it rolls over on him. The log rolling onto the Male is problematic, as it’s in water and his head is just above the surface. The bigfoot’s further inability to understand or harness technology does make way for the young Male’s death.
Young Male’s demise
The Female, who is suffering from pains indicating the birth of the baby squatch is near, tries to use her own brute force to rock the log off the young Male. Her failures cause it to slip and then roll further on the Male, driving him completely under the water to drown.
The Child does attempt to use a stick as a lever, but unfortunately his non-mastery of the technology only aided in hastening the death of his fellow bigfoot, rather than give him the aid he needed.
Not being able to harness technology of sorts killed off the only viable mate for the Female – thus, killing off the species.
The Female
The Female’s role through “Sasquatch Sunset” was that to make more bigfoot. Mother to the Child and mate to the Alpha, the Female fills those roles.
The mother
The Female understands her role more than the other bigfoot. By knowing she was with child, she emancipated herself from being the object of sexual release to the Alpha – as well as the young Male – and turned down advances. The self-awareness that her role is to birth, raise, and nurture the young, also means she knows she does not need to engage in sexual acts when with child – the deed was done.
In this instance, the Female being the sacred vessel to carry on the species is very important. However, that seriousness – and her understanding – of what her job in the community was may have given rise to the Alpha’s sexual frustrations. The Alpha’s inability to deal with said frustrations led to his demise.
Sexuality
Where the Female fails in this story is that she did not understand – or simply knew and did not care – about the subversion of the fulfillment of carnal desires. While it’s the female sasquath’s role to bear offspring, it’s not her responsibility to ensure that all the males are “taken care of.”
Unlike the deer and elk pictured in the movie, the squatch seems more like man, lacking a “rut” or mating season. Just because the Female was with child did not mean that the male participants in the story were without desire.
These concepts raise the important question on what role does sexuality play in our society, not necessarily just the role of partners, but all facets of intimacy of the human condition. In the story of the Alpha, his aggression due to being unable to cope with rejection is what kills him.
Reaction to unknown
The Female, much like the young Male, ends up acting in an aggressive manner to things she does not understand. Where the young Male was the leader in the revolt against the road, the Female leads a revolt against a campsite she and the Child stumble upon.
One area where the Female differed in her approach to the unknown, she was curious at first, and then it was her frustrations of the new, or unknown, that made her lash out.
This is symbolic, perhaps, that even the most even-minded person, or persons, will have an eventual meltdown over what they don’t or can’t understand. The meltdown might manifest either symbolically, internally, or as in the case of trashing the campsite and peeing/defecating on the road, physically.
The physical destruction of the campsite might suggest that we’re doomed as a species as well.
The Child
The Child has a lot of the imaginative qualities of the young Male. It’s probable that the Child is the child of the Alpha, but this is not obvious. The young Male is shown in the film at one point or another playing with the Child and interacting with him as if he were a fun-loving adult role model. That relationship could be just as easy to be summed up as a cool uncle, or that awesome family friend, as much as the behavior could just be that of an engaging father.
The Child has some loneliness issues as he lacks true peers. On multiple occasions he’s seen communicating with his hand, as if it were an imaginary friend. One instance of curiosity in making connections involved a turtle who bites the juvenile’s tongue.
In the end
Towards the end of the film, it’s winter. There are three bigfoot left at that point. The Female, the Child, and a newborn sasquatch.
The winter is symbolic of the end. And that end almost draws nearer than we expect when the newborn sasquatch stops breathing in the middle of one night, only to be resuscitated by the Female. As the Female stimulates the limp body of the baby squatch, you’ll be rooting for the baby and survival of the species, at that time being fully emotionally invested into the story of these beings. The baby’s resuscitation is just a stalling of the inevitable.
Before the ending, the troop of remaining bigfoot find themselves walking into “civilization.” Abandoned machinery and other items one would find in the backyard of a farm or facility are passed by. These machines tell the story of progress, one that the bigfoot don’t really know.
In the end, the Child and Female attempt to communicate with the wooden carving of a bigfoot outside the China Flat Bigfoot Museum. They’re unable to communicate with the only thing they’ve found resembling them, and it’s frozen in time.
The sasquatch are shown standing next to the giant carving, a glimpse of what will remain when they slip into extinction. There’s no viable path forward for the species. They will either die off because of the lack of genetic diversity, or they’ll die off from an obligation to no engage in incest.
Overall opinion of the film
“Sasquatch Sunset” is a great film. It, however, is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Pages and pages of more analysis can be done on this film, and this review only scratches the surface on what I see the depth of it to be. It’s my hope that these insights might enhance your viewing – or hopefully reviewing – of the film.
“Sasquatch Sunset” is available via streaming as well as on Blu-Ray/DVD. Learn more about “Sasquatch Sunset” over at the homepage with Bleecker Street Media and check out their gloriously entertaining Instagram page.
Sound off in the comments below. What did you think of “Sasquatch Sunset”? What did you see in the film?
