It might be one of the finest pieces of acting of the year so far. Near the end of Sasquatch Sunset, the gloriously weird feature from David and Nathan Zellner, Riley Keough wordlessly conveys a slowly creeping moment of profound existential despair that crushes your heart with its bleakness. It’s all the more impressive that she achieves this using her eyes alone, since her face and body are encased in a thick prosthetic layer of foam and straggly fake hair.
Keough plays one of the family of four sasquatches (the mythical creature also known as bigfoot) that the film follows over the course of a year as the primitive, grunting ape-like creatures lumber through the forests of the Pacific north-west of America. It’s an extraordinary film, an entirely singular creative venture. You won’t have seen anything quite like it before. It’s quite possible that you would prefer not to watch anything quite like it ever again. But for anyone who is intrigued by the idea of a movie that serves as both a treatise on despair and loneliness, and a delivery vehicle for extravagantly crass toilet humour, weaponised faeces, absurd sight gags and some rather bracing sexual encounters, this rather wonderful oddity ticks all the boxes.
