Sasquatch Sunset gives us an intimate glimpse into where the wild things are.

Nobody speaks a word in Sasquatch Sunset, but it still manages to grunt, howl, and defecate its way through more depth than most indie darlings dare. For the better part of its runtime, it lumbers along as a curious, almost absurdist nature documentary without a narrator – Bigfoot as Attenborough’s dream subject, if Attenborough were into slow cinema and bodily fluids. What unfolds is part primal slapstick, part elegy for a world we’ve long since paved over – and the punchline, when it comes, isn’t a joke so much as a quiet ecological tragedy whispered through ferns and moss.

David and Nathan Zellner’s film initially tricks the audience into placing it somewhere between prehistoric myth and surrealist mythmaking. It’s all damp forests, overripe fruit, and ritualistic rock-humping, lit with the kind of reverence usually reserved for Terrence Malick’s more fragrant field trips. The Sasquatch family – yes, an actual family unit, with all the dysfunctional dynamics that implies – live and wander through these woods with a sense of sacred idiocy, played completely straight. Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough vanish into layers of fur and prosthetics, delivering full-body performances that manage to be both comically grotesque and heartbreakingly earnest. It’s absurd but never mocking; these creatures are not jokes – they’re tragic little gods.

The film toys mercilessly with the audience’s sense of time and setting. Is this deep past? An untouched corner of the world? Is it now, or never? That question lingers right up until the halfway point, when a tree marked for logging appears like a neon scar across the mythic landscape. Shortly after, a road cuts through the frame – smooth, straight, and jarringly modern – revealing the tragic truth: we are not watching a prehistoric past, but a vanishing present. The Sasquatch, it turns out, are not ancestors. They are remnants.

This shift doesn’t derail the tone – it deepens it. What was once eccentric becomes elegiac. The rituals, the mating dances, the petty arguments over food and peeing spots – all of it takes on the weight of extinction. There’s genuine pathos in watching these creatures, who may not understand the concept of death but definitely feel the sting of loss. The Zellners, whose past work (Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, Damsel) has always danced on the border between fairy tale and existential shrug, are in their element here. Where Damsel skewered Western heroism and Kumiko rewrote Coen myth as tragic fantasy, Sasquatch Sunset asks what it means to be legendary when no one remembers you.

And it’s funny – often very funny. There are poop gags, fart gags, mating rituals that wouldn’t be out of place in a South Park skit (albeit one performed by enthusiastic furries after a particularly spiritual ayahuasca trip). But the humour always comes with a whiff of melancholy. This isn’t Land of the Lost nonsense – it’s Waiting for Godot in wet fur, where the passage of time is marked by how often someone poops or loses another member of the group.

The ending doesn’t offer comfort. It doesn’t even offer closure. What it offers is a mirror: what have we paved over, ignored, or laughed away into extinction? What folklore did we flatten to build the car parks we now live in? Sasquatch Sunset is a eulogy disguised as absurdist theatre – a goofy, silent scream into the uncaring void.

And somehow, it’s kind of beautiful.