BRISBANE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: In this oddly earnest and new agey US independent from Christopher Munch, a young woman gets over a busted relationship by retreating into the Oregon forest and communing with the mythical hairy anthropoid known as Bigfoot, or Sasquatch.
That’s right. The Thoreau-inspired tradition of Americans heading into the wilderness to commune with nature – see Old Joy, A River Runs Through It and Into the Wild – is being taken out for another trek around the rainforest. This time it’s mystical.
The adventurer here is a young woman, Sarah (played by Lily Rabe, daughter of Jill Clayburgh), an environmental officer employed by an agency known as Sweetwater whose business profile is never made entirely clear.
Sarah travels into a remote part of the forest by foot to collect samples as part of a survey of the area following a forest fire. Keen to be alone, she quickly gets the feeling she’s being followed. When a young bushwalker named Sean (Jason Butler Harner) stumbles across a riverside clearing where she’s parked herself, she accuses him of stalking her and warns him she’s armed before allowing to camp for the night nearby. They part on more trusting terms, paving the way for the development of romantic tension in later scenes.
At first, long eerie silences punctuated by the ominous cracking of twigs and strange long shots of Sarah suggest that she is indeed being watched, indicating a conventional horror film ahead about things that go bump in the woods. That this is not Munch’s plan of action becomes clear when he matter-of-factly introduces the hairy Bigfoot in plain sight of the audience (though not of Sarah), which has the effect of downplaying any suspense or mystery that’s begun to build up.
At this point viewers will either accept the Sasquatch as a given, or, like this viewer, raise eyebrows in disbelief while thinking back to Harry and the Hendersons. While the creature’s make up looks convincing enough, its unmistakably human gait is a problem, suggesting an actor inside a modified ape suit.
Why Munch – best known for the well-regarded 1991 John Lennon-Brian Epstein picture, The Hours and Times – decided to let us see so much of the creature instead of catching only vague and tantalising glimpses is hard to figure, for it robs the film of much of the mystery needed to make it effective.
Sarah, meanwhile, has daytime hallucinations and nighttime dreams about the living thing she senses is out there. Increasingly it seems she’s picking up clues via extra-sensory perception. Before she’s even glimpsed it once, she starts painting small watercolours inspired by the creature.
Unlike Werner Herzog’s great wilderness documentary Grizzly Man, which unsentimentally portrayed nature as unknowable, unpredictable and cruel, Munch’s film offers a benign vision in which a gifted, sensitive individual is able to commune with an unknown creature of the forest on a metaphysical level. The overall message is that nature and humans can get along. Even a logger friend of Sarah’s turns out to be a sensitive new age guy who believes that the Sasquatch occupy 'a different reality".
Beyond this dopey attitude, the film suffers from structural issues when it hits the second half. Munch’s solution to the slackness of the narrative is to introduce corporate thriller elements but it’s clearly not a genre he feels comfortable with, and the same goes for his lame attempts at writing romantic badinage for Sarah and Sean.
Yet for all its many flaws, the film can be often ravishing to watch, many of the gloriously photographed scenes of Sarah’s forest trekking achieving an affectingly meditative stillness, especially in the first half. While it offers an ultimately unsatisfying journey, there are some pleasant experiences along the way.
