With sincere and true respect for the talents of all those individuals who climb inside mascot costumes and become Gritty or Mr. Met or Benny the Bull or Bucky Badger or Paydirt Pete or Brutus Buckeye, you wouldn’t know it if an equally skilled person took over mid-game, right? I mean, how could you?
The Mascot Conundrum, as the experts call it — all right, I just made that up — came to mind when I was making the difficult slog through the admittedly ambitious but quite disgusting and weirdly inconsistent bigfoot drama/satire “Sasquatch Sunset.”
One must give props to the talented actors Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough for disappearing under the Sasquatch costumes and makeup and throwing themselves into their respective roles, and I have no doubt they worked hard on their movements and their grunts and their growls and such. But given that there’s not a line of dialogue in this surreal, docudrama-style adventure story, there are long stretches of time when it could be just about anybody under the cryptid outfit. Yes, there’s room for facial expressions, and there are some closeups when we can see the eyes of one of the Sasquatches, but on balance: Mascot Conundrum.
Directed by the undeniably talented duo of Nathan Zellner and David Zellner (“Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter,” 2018’s “Damsel”), with David penning the script, “Sasquatch Sunset” takes place in the 1980s (the clues are admittedly fun) and chronicles a year in the lives of a family of Sasquatches. Jesse Eisenberg and Nathan Zellner portray adult males, while Riley Keough is an adult female and Christophe Zajac-Denek is a young ‘un.
They comport themselves almost like aliens who have been dropped onto the planet, as they’re unfamiliar with nearly every creature they encounter, from a turtle to a mountain lion. Also, they’re not the least bit ferocious and seem quite small, i.e., Jesse Eisenberg’s Sasquatch appears to be about 5-foot-7, which is the height of Jesse Eisenberg. I suppose that’s the point — that while humankind has long thought of the Sasquatch as a ferocious and mighty beast, they’re more like us than we thought, and perhaps more afraid of us than we are of them.
A great deal of “Sasquatch Sunset” — and when I say a great deal, I mean most of the friggin’ movie — is preoccupied with showing us various bodily functions of the Squatchers in graphic and nauseating detail. Peeing, pooping, sneezing, scratching, rutting, fondling themselves, smelling their own fingers after fondling themselves, hurling excrement … it never ends, until the movie ends. (That the practical effects are so impressively rendered doesn’t make it better.) One Sasquatch is so randy it considers sexual congress with a couple of different options, none of them promising. Keough’s Sasquatch gets pregnant.
The group sometimes displays a growing collective intelligence, and yet it still seems as if this is somehow their first year of existence, or they have zero sense memory. A few attempts at poignancy seem half-hearted and deeply cynical, given all the crap (literally) we’ve experienced along the way.
“Sasquatch Sunset” is the kind of film that seems almost pre-ordained to reach some level of cult status. Godspeed to those who will embrace its epic-level gross-out factor. I guess I’m just more of a Bucky Badger guy.