Sasquatch Sunset

As boys, David and Nathan Zellner saw Patterson and Gimlin's famous 1967 footage of a supposed Bigfoot striding through the woods, and they've never got it out of their heads. In 2011 they took a short on the subject, 'Sasquatch Birth Journal 2', to Sundance, and thirteen years later they were back at the festival with 'Sasquatch Sunset', their fifth feature after 'Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter' and 'Damsel': a year in the life of a Sasquatch family, without a single line of dialogue.

There are four of them, living in the forests of Northern California: a female (Riley Keough), two adult males, one played by Jesse Eisenberg and the other, the group's brute, by Nathan Zellner himself, and a youngster (Christophe Zajac-Denek). They spend their days foraging, mating and beating trees with sticks in case another Sasquatch answers. Nobody does.

The film follows them season by season, from spring to winter. It starts as a very crude comedy, with fermented berry binges and plenty of bodily fluids, and turns sadder as signs of people start to appear: a red cross painted on a tree, a road that terrifies them, a tent with a tape deck.

Keough and Eisenberg, who also produces, are unrecognisable under Steve Newburn's suits and prosthetics (he'd just worked on 'Beau Is Afraid'), and before shooting the cast went through an "ape camp" so they'd move like one species. It was filmed among the redwoods of Humboldt County, with Ari Aster's company Square Peg behind it.

After Sundance it played the Berlinale, and Bleecker Street opened it in the US in April 2024 to mostly good reviews that praised the actors, though its grosser humour put some critics off. Icon released it in UK cinemas on 14 June 2024, with a 15 certificate.

• Fantasy
• Comedy
• Drama