Something to watch tonight: Friday 6 December

Sasquatch Sunset (Zellner and Zellner, 2024)

One of the wildest, weirdest and most transcendent films of the year has arrived as a digital rental and you could do a lot worse than immerse yourself in the mythical – yet strangely familiar – world of the North American Bigfoot.

Sasquatch Sunset played the New Zealand International Film Festival this year and I wrote about it for RNZ:

Back before the unwitting programmer purge of early 2024, NZIFF would have an Incredibly Strange strand of films of which Sasquatch Sunset would have been this year’s headliner. (There is a strand this year called Nocturnal which does a similar job of highlighting the weird, the wonderful and the ‘midnight movies’ destined to become cult hits.)

Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg, Christophe Zajac-Denek and co-director Nathan Zellner play a family of sasquatches roaming the forests of North America. We watch as they groom, forage, shag and get stoned on nature’s psychedelic bounty.

Over four seasons, we get to know them – the alpha, the carer, the seeker and the child who appears to talk to himself by puppeteering his own hand. We also get a sense of why there are so few of these mythical creatures left. Indeed, this family may be the very last.

The circle of life is never very far away for this family, with – fair warning – all of the viscera that involves.

The performances under all that prosthetic technology are a marvel, especially Keough who manages to project a deep sense of soulfulness through eyes that can see the world but don’t understand it why it seems determined to cause them such pain.

This is one of those little cinematic miracles where the weirder it gets, the more profound it becomes, and is destined to become one of my favourite films of the year.

Also featured in that NZIFF preview: German drama The Teacher’s Lounge, concert film Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, music documentary In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, Léa Seydoux and George Mackay playing multiple roles in The Beast and the beautifully optimistic The Monk and the Gun.