This movie isn't really about sasquatches. I wish I had the chance to ask the writer or director, but I think it's about humanity, and about the horror behind the philosophical knowledge that we're nothing but risen brutes.

When the creatures engage in behaviours we find disgusting or shameful like constantly asking the female for sex (and not caring who's around when she agrees, like the opening scene shows) or throwing their own faeces at other animals to frighten them off, we only feel that way because we know/suspect our own ancestors were just as disgusting and stupid millennia ago.

The directors David (who also writes) and Nathan Zellner seem to lean into all the squirmy, uncomfortable visuals they can muster in the goings-on that involve long strings of dirty hair matted with half chewed food, vomit and the beetles and bugs they eat as they groom each other like chimps, filthy water and blood from a birth scene. It'll make you feel dirty but only because that's how humans existed for a hundred thousand years before we invented showers, hospitals or air conditioning.

That said, I might be reading way too much into the intent. I feel like I identified all the above as the central theme only because there's so little to talk about in the way of a story. The goings on are as weird, because they're mythical creatures, as they are prosaic, because they depict proto-humans barely a step above animals going through the motions of trying to survive in the wild.

A plot? There's an older, bigger alpha male (co-director Nathan Zellner), a young male (Jesse Eisenberg), a young female (Riley Keough) and what appears to be an adolescent (Christophe Zajac-Denek) making their way through what might be the Pacific Northwest of the US. They eat, sleep, fight, mate and die as a matter of course in the dog eat dog world of nature, their every move and every minute of survival resting on their own stupidity, desperation or dumb luck.

The only deeper throughline from a narrative standpoint might be how every now and then they collect in a rough square, select four likely looking trees, one of them gives a signal and they all pound a simple beat on them with logs or large sticks, staring at the jungle and sky around them and listening intently.

Are they trying to make contact with a tribe they've lost, or are they just hoping they're not the last of their kind?

Despite being about sasquatches, it could have been about a small family of Australopithecines in 10,000 BC – it's only when they final two surviving members of the party stumble upon a sasquatch museum somewhere in the forests of Northern California that the movie seems to be saying something about the sasquatch myth.

At times it's uproariously funny, like when they come across a highway for the first time ever, shriek in horror looking one way, turn to see it snake off in the other direction and shriek in horror again, then turn back and shriek in horror all over again when the first glimpse of it is still there.

The makeup is top notch, and even though you can't really identify the actors underneath (although they're very game for what the location and the script puts them through) they emote as much as necessary for the limited range of expressions their characters have a command of.

All in all it's an enigma. It might be about something much deeper than anything going on on screen, or it might be the perfect example of the type of film you hear a lot of directors and writers talk about – one they want their audience to take their own interpretation away with.