'Sasquatch Sunset' review: You'll wish you never spotted this Bigfoot

Jesse Eisenberg stars in "Sasquatch Sunset," though you'd never know it by watching the movie. He plays one of four sasquatches in the frustratingly abstract drama, a dialogue-free experiment about a year in the life of a group of Bigfoots.

We track the hairy creatures — they're played by Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Metro Detroit native Christophe Zajac-Denek and co-director Nathan Zellner, all completely unrecognizable — as they traipse through the forest, perform various rituals, mate, grunt, attempt to count, eat their own boogers, trip on mushrooms and smell each other's (and their own) fingers. And you thought your weekend plans were exciting.

They're not cuddly; they're disgusting, feral beings. Any compassion or resignation in their eyes is assigned to them by the human actors, which makes this an entirely odd proposition for a film: Is the point to humanize the sasquatch? Or to empathize with it? Or are were merely observing a year in the life of a fictional beast, so as to better understand ourselves, and what makes us human?

There are more questions than answers in Zellner's film, which he co-directed with his brother David. (David also wrote the script.) We see the circle of life play out, we watch as the group discovers human creature comforts, and we bear witness to all of the sasquatches. (Yes, all of them.) The Zellners present "Sasquatch Sunset" as a kind of riff on a nature documentary, fiction through the guise of a non-fictional lens.

But it's a tedious, patience-trying exercise, and the film's juvenile reliance on scatological and anatomical humor grows tiresome. Does it want to be a deep experience about the world around us, or is it a meta joke perpetrated on the audience? Either way, this "Sasquatch Sunset" fades quickly.

agraham@detroitnews.com

'Sasquatch Sunset'

GRADE: D+

Rated R: for some sexual content, full nudity and bloody images

Running time: 89 minutes

In theaters