Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The Sasquatch, aka Bigfoot, is a mythical creature supposedly sighted in remote regions of North America. No less elusive are Texas-based brothers David and Nathan Zellner, who since the late 1990s have worked on the fringes of US indie cinema, accumulating a catalogue of eccentric shorts and features. They won attention with 2014’s tragicomic Kumiko: The Treasure Hunter, but Sasquatch Sunset deserves to be their breakthrough; it is genuinely like nothing else.Set across four seasons, the film explores a primal world of forests, rivers and mountains, the territory once celebrated by 19th-century landscape painters in the style known as the American Sublime. The only characters are four Sasquatches, first seen proceeding in single file across the wilderness, their businesslike gait giving them a distinct comic lugubriousness, a touch of Buster Keaton. There are three adults, one of them female, and a child, and their preoccupations are pretty much those of any creature: food, shelter, sex, the spilling of bodily fluids.Inside Steve Newburn’s creature suits are four human actors, two very well-known but unrecognisable: Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Christophe Zajac-Denek and Nathan Zellner himself as the clan’s grouchily priapic elder. We see nothing of their faces beneath the rubbery masks, yet the eyes peering out make all four creatures remarkably expressive as they register lust, bafflement, sorrow, nausea. There are no words, only gestures, grunts, chirrups. Bodily functions feature prominently: in one priceless scene, the family encounter something new and troubling, and copiously void their orifices in a spontaneous dirty protest.Farcical gross-out notwithstanding, the film has a poignant, lyrical spirit underlined by its soundtrack of mock-folksy flute and guitar. It is majestically shot by Mike Gioulakis, capturing the luminous vistas you might associate with Terrence Malick.Sasquatch life seems idyllic in its smelly way — but peril and death are ever-present realities. Then comes a discovery that changes everything, making the film all the more philosophically rich and resonant about the history of the American continent — right up to the deadpan visual punchline. It rounds off a shaggy-humanoid story of a bizarrely transcendental kind.★★★★★ In cinemas from June 14
