I want to address the walkouts first.
At Sundance, people left their seats during Sasquatch Sunset. They gathered their coats, stood up, and walked out of a film about a Sasquatch family navigating one full calendar year in the wilderness. A creature they weren't prepared to take seriously did something biological on screen, and they decided that was the film's problem rather than theirs.
I've spent nineteen years in the field. I've crouched in mud at 3 a.m. listening for wood knocks. I've eaten granola bars that had been in my jacket pocket 5 years.
I'm not made uncomfortable by what animals do in a forest.
Those people at Sundance missed the point so completely that I'm not sure they were watching the same movie.
What the Film Actually Is
Sasquatch Sunset, directed by David and Nathan Zellner, follows four Sasquatch across the four seasons of a single year. No narration. No dialogue. No human character arriving to explain what you're seeing, and no title card announcing anything.
Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg spent two hours a day in the makeup chair and then moved through the wilderness under full prosthetics for the entire production.
They worked with a movement coach. They studied how a creature of that size and probable anatomy would carry its weight, communicate, grieve, and sleep.
The result is a performance that exists entirely through posture and breath and the angle of a shoulder.
This isn't a small achievement.
A lot of people said it was just an excuse for Eisenberg not to talk. Those people haven't thought about what it means to convey complex emotion through a rubber face and a grunt.
A man named Dennis from my Tuesday research group described the costumes as cheap. He said they gave him a "Harry and the Hendersons vibe."
Dennis, the blatherskite, watched a team spend two hours every single morning applying individually laid fur to four actors' bodies over a full production schedule and concluded it looked cheap.
I don't know what dumb Dennis considers expensive. I suspect nothing that involves effort would satisfy Dennis.
The Comparisons People Are Making
Multiple people compared the film to Quest for Fire, the 1981 Jean-Jacques Annaud film about prehistoric humans searching for flame.
This is a correct comparison.
Quest for Fire also had no conventional dialogue, also followed creatures navigating survival with limited tools, and was also dismissed by part of the audience before eventually being recognized as a significant work.
Others called it "Wes Anderson remade Quest for Fire," or "The Greasy Strangler gone arthouse," or post-modern naturalism, or something in the tradition of Jodorowsky and Lanthimos.
None of these comparisons are wrong.
People reaching for references this specific aren't people who hated the film.
They're people whose brains activated.
That's what avant-garde cinema does. The people who walked out had their brains go quiet instead.
The Gigli Comparison
My cousin Russ texted me: "Well I think we've found the new Gigli!"
Russ manages a Jiffy Lube in Grants Pass. I want to be fair to Russ.
Gigli is a 2003 romantic comedy starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez.
It holds a 6% on Rotten Tomatoes.
It was made with a large budget, conventional dialogue, a recognizable genre framework, and two of the most famous faces in American entertainment, and it failed by every standard anyone uses to measure films.
Sasquatch Sunset has no dialogue, no familiar genre, and actors hidden entirely under prosthetics. It went to Berlinale and Sundance. I
t's discussed in the same sentence as Tarkovsky and Bresson by people who've actually seen it.
A Portuguese man on the internet reviewed it in his own language from what appears to be genuine emotion about the female Sasquatch's experience of grief.
People called him cry baby.
These aren't the same thing. I'm choosing to believe Russ typed quickly and didn't fully consider what he was doing. Russ has been wrong before.
On the Negative Comments
Chuck Woodcock stopped watching halfway through and then called me. He said, and I am quoting directly: "That's the worst movie I ever seen. I felt bad for every person in that theater."
Chuck left at the halfway point, felt bad for strangers on their behalf, drove home, and called me about it.
The second half of Sasquatch Sunset is where the film earns everything the first half sets up.
It's where the grief arrives, where the season changes, where the encounter with human civilization happens and the weight of it lands on you without anyone telling you it should.
Leaving at the halfway point of this particular film is like leaving a funeral before the eulogy because the parking lot was cold.
Sherry, who makes my coffee at the Starbucks on Redwood Highway, fell asleep five times during the film.
She told me this on a Tuesday. I want to think carefully about what it means.
A person who hated something doesn't fall back asleep in it five times.
Sherry kept returning. I'd argue she was in some kind of meditative communion with the film's pacing.
Scoutmaster Jim sent a long email. He dismissed the film for its lack of dialogue and what he called, verbatim, "tired and well-worn clichés." He ended by asking that no one rush to make a sequel.
I want to address the clichés accusation. Sasquatch Sunset has no villain. No love interest in the conventional sense. No third-act reversal, and no scene where a character explains what the film is about.
If Scoutmaster Jim found clichés in this film, he brought them with him. Jim is an organized man. It's possible he brought a whole folder of them.
What My Stepson Got Right
My stepson isn't what I'd call the brightest bulb in the box.
He called after he saw it and said: "Dad, this is gonna be one of those movies where one person in a group of friends loves it and the rest of them say that was the worst thing they've ever seen."
Trevor for once, is correct. A film that everyone agrees was fine is a film designed to not fail, which is a different thing from being designed to succeed.
Sasquatch Sunset was designed to succeed at something specific and difficult.
It succeeded.
The friends who hated it will be wrong about it for the rest of their lives.
I've been in that position myself. I was in a group of people who laughed at me for believing a giant unknown bipedal huge creature lives in the woods and travels via portals.
No one's laughing now.
On the Question of Accuracy
A man in my field network named Garrett left a one-star review because the Sasquatch were portrayed, in his words, "like dumb apes."
He said he'd hoped for a decent Sasquatch movie and was disappointed.
I understand this frustration more than I understand most of the criticism I've encountered.
This is like what I thought about Son of Bigfoot, but there's one big difference.
It comes from a real place. People who've spent time in this field know that what's documented doesn't look like a dumb ape.
The gait's wrong for a dumb ape. The reported intelligence isn't consistent with a dumb ape.
I've documented three suspected proximity events. In none of them did the subject behave like a dumb ape.
However. Sasquatch Sunset isn't a documentary and isn't claiming to be.
The Zellner brothers are filmmakers, not field researchers. Their question isn't "what is Sasquatch actually like?"
It's "what does it feel like to watch an entire world shrink around you with no language to describe what's happening?"
Those are different projects. Garrett is right that better documentation is needed. He isn't right that this film was the place for it.
My associate Pete, who has done serious First Nations consultation work in British Columbia, made the additional point that every native tribe in this region has long histories with these beings, and that witnesses consistently describe subjects far larger and more physically powerful than what the film depicts.
This is also correct. It's an argument for more serious documentary work in this field, not an argument against Sasquatch Sunset. These aren't competing ideas.
A Note About My Wife
After the film, Linda told me the subjects looked nothing like what we've encountered together. She said the alpha in our 2021 Olympic Peninsula event stood a full foot taller and moved with what she described as "a kind of deliberateness that these ones didn't have."
She noted the film's juvenile was smaller than the one we heard in the understory that night. She found the vocalizations underwritten. "They'd do more with their hands," she said.
Linda is correct on all of these points. I've already addressed why that doesn't diminish the film. What I haven't said yet is that Linda also cried at the end.
She said she didn't want to, and then she did anyway. I've known Linda for eleven years. She didn't cry at Braveheart. She did not cry at our wedding.
The film made Linda cry. I don't think Scoutmaster Jim's email accounted for that possibility.
What the Film Is Actually About
Trevor, my stepson, also sent me a voicenote that night. He said: " I think the whole thing is about extinction. Sunset means the end. They're the last ones. The road at the end isn't just a road."
Trevor arrived at this from a two-minute trailer. Other people I know were making beef jerky jokes.
The film's an elegy. It follows a family that doesn't know it's watching its world end, because families like that never know. They keep doing the things families do: marking territory, grieving their dead, having young, moving through seasons that keep changing in a direction that doesn't favor them.
The road scene isn't there because the Zellner brothers thought it was funny. It's there because that's what it looks like when a creature that's never encountered human infrastructure tries to understand what it's looking at. It can't understand. It has no frame.
A woman named Patricia from my church, who saw the film alone on a Wednesday matinee, texted me one sentence afterward: "Everyday these people are headed for damnation and hell." I don't know exactly what she meant. But I think Patricia was watching a different film than the people who walked out. I think she felt something real.
Billy from Karate Camp
Billy Firth has been in my Thursday night Sasquatch research group since 2022. He attended karate camp with my stepson four summers ago. He is twenty-three years old and very confident.
Billy said the film was satire and parody, and that he was five hundred percent sure that people who took it seriously were missing the joke.
This is the most interesting species of bad-faith criticism. It assumes in advance that people who find something meaningful in a work have been deceived — that they're performing depth rather than experiencing it. It protects the speaker from having to consider that the work might actually contain what others are finding in it.
I've encountered this argument in a different context. When I report a sighting, certain people decide what the witness saw and what it meant before any investigation. They decide no further inquiry is necessary because the conclusion was already reached. That isn't skepticism. It's the shape skepticism makes when it's already decided.
Billy thought the Patterson-Gimlin film was also probably a joke until I showed him the biomechanics analysis. He didn't say anything for a while after that.
Sasquatch Sunset is deeper than it looks. I'm not performing this opinion. The film earned it.
Why This Is One of the Greatest Avant-Garde Films Ever Imagined
The avant-garde tradition in cinema exists to do one thing: strip the medium down to what it actually is, which is images and time. What does a creature look like when it encounters something it's never seen before?
What does grief look like on a face that can't make the shapes we've learned to associate with grief?
What does the passage of a year feel like when you're living inside it with no calendar, no language, no ability to name what's happening to you?
Sasquatch Sunset answers these questions the way Tarkovsky answered questions about memory, and the way Herzog answered questions about obsession. Not by explaining. By showing. By trusting the image.
Ari Aster, who produced the film, makes movies about grief. People sometimes call those movies horror. They aren't wrong, but they aren't complete. Sasquatch Sunset is also a movie about grief.
It's about creatures who have no words for what's being lost and so they move through it using only their bodies. The audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is mixed. This doesn't concern me. The audience score for 2001: A Space Odyssey was also mixed in 1968. I have a card about this somewhere.
Final Assessment
Scoutmaster Jim, who sent the long email about clichés, added one thing at the end that I've been thinking about. He wrote: "I do think in fifteen or twenty years some people will call this a classic. I won't be one of them."
Jim is correct about the timeline. He may be underestimating it.
Sasquatch Sunset will gain stature over time. It'll be the movie that one person in the group was right about. It'll be shown in film programs. It'll be the thing people mention when they want to establish that they were paying attention in 2024. Russ will not bring up the Gigli text. Chuck Woodcock will say he always thought there was something to it. Sherry will not remember falling asleep.
Trevor will remember. Linda will remember. Patricia from church will remember.
See it. Sit through the second half. Don't leave when it makes you uncomfortable.
That discomfort is the movie working.
