In short: Sasquatch (2021)

During the 90s, while “visiting a friend” at a California cannabis farm, future investigative reporter David Holthouse heard a crazy rumour about some people having been murdered by a Sasquatch there.

Now, a couple of decades later, this Hulu true crime miniseries directed by Joshua Rofé and produced by the company of the Duplass brothers follows Holthouse’s attempts to get at the truth behind the crazy story. While certainly not being a bigfoot believer, Holthouse is clearly convinced that there’s something worthwhile to find out here. Turns out he’s right.

Generally, I am not the greatest fan of the true crime genre. In my eyes, large parts of it are sensationalist wallowing in other people’s suffering that all too often also tends to try and squeeze reality into the structure of a dramatic narrative, a shape that simply does not fit. Let’s not even talk about the needy way these things always want to end up on a big reveal of “THE TRUTH”, even if it is actually wild speculation.

There are of course exception to the rule: I have more time for the politically more engaged arm of the genre that tries to seek justice for the marginalized and the ignored. Of course, these, too, can fall into melodrama, but they don’t do so regularly. Shit, it turns out, is bad enough without filmmakers (and writers, and so on), having to make it worse.

There’s another string to the genre too, books and films that use a central crime to explore a whole social and historical place, which tends to be the part of the genre I’m most interested in. As it happens, the series at hand turns out to belong to that area of its genre, using much of its running time on building context. It starts out with something of a potted, localized mini-history of bigfoot hunting most viewers vaguely in touch with that material will probably not find terribly new but then segues into an exploration of the culture of commercial (and at that time illegal) marijuana growers in California, the negative impact the war on drugs had on it (turns out the naively used state violence made the situation much more violent instead of doing anything against drugs), putting Holthouse’s investigation into its proper context.

From time to time, the series does indulge in a bit of melodrama when it comes to the investigation, but mostly, it’s an often highly interesting and – dare I say it – educational dive into a culture and the changes it goes through. That the series also ends up with a not completely implausible sounding working theory it actually calls a theory about that whole bigfoot murder business is certainly another notch in its cap.