What In the ...

Earlier this month, I watched what will probably be the strangest movie I see all year. Sasquatch Sunset is an absurdist film chronicling the lives of four Bigfoots (Bigfeet?). The cast, which includes Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg, donned heavy prosthetics, layers of makeup, and furry costumes to play the titular mythical creatures. The script is devoid of dialogue. Instead, the group grunts, moans, and shrieks from scene to scene while carrying on with much feral behavior: They feast on berries; they fight; they wander the woods. In one very long, very goofy sequence, they urinate and defecate on the ground over and over and over to mark their territory.

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The film played at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and I caught it in Park City, Utah, the day after it left some audiences “stomping for the exit … well before the credits began to roll,” as Variety reported from the premiere. The same happened at my screening: I counted more than a dozen walkouts, several of them occurring after the defecation montage, and many more after one of the creatures spent a scene repeatedly masturbating and sniffing his fingers. The movie, which will be released in theaters later this year, has thus become the latest in a long line of arthouse films—think the Daniels’s Swiss Army Man, Julia Ducournau’s Raw and Titane, Ari Aster’s Hereditary—that have made viewers want to stop, well, viewing altogether.

[Good Lord. This sounds like a commentary on Hollywood studio output in this era, but this is a bit much even for that kind of satire. Why in the world would a distributor spend money to put this in cinemas at all? If they’re walking out at Sundance, who’s going to stick around and watch it, even in arthouse cinemas? — Ed]

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