Exists, or, Found Bigfootage

Just a few minutes into the Sasquatch-themed found footage movie Exists, as our protagonists are riding through the wilderness at night on their way to a remote cabin, the girls in the back seat hold a mini blowtorch near the face of a sleeping guy in the front seat, giggling the whole time, for the purpose of setting his beard on fire.

It’s significant because the director of Exists, Eduardo Sánchez, was one of the co-creators of The Blair Witch Project. That movie seemed to take forever making you thoroughly dislike its characters, as part of its winding you up to be so tense that even the most innocuous events would be terrifying. This one is a hell of a lot more efficient; you hate everybody in the car within minutes. They’re psychopaths with GoPros.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t ever really do much with that hatred. The characters are too annoying to get invested in, but not interesting enough to relish their impending murders via Sasquatch. The only tension in the movie comes from the inherent creepiness of being in the woods at night, and hearing growls or moans in the distance, or a sudden branch snapping. Even then, the movie seems to be dead-set on finding ways to undercut its own tension. Like a cheap jump scare where two guys leap out from behind a tree at night and begin firing semiautomatic paintball rifles at Beard Guy. As I said: psychopaths.

I had low expectations for Exists, but since it’s about dumb people going into the woods to make video of Sasquatches, I assumed that it’d still be my thing. But there’s just nothing to grab onto here. The characters aren’t obnoxious in interesting ways, and they’re not killed in interesting ways. I’d been hoping that at least there’d be some graphic shots of a Sasquatch just tearing someone apart, but there’s really nothing more than a lot of blunt force trauma.

And I’m typically extremely forgiving of found footage movies playing fast and loose with the format; I’m not at all one of the people who asks “what camera took that shot?” or “why are they still filming this?” Here, I was wondering that constantly. Apart from exactly one scene (where a guy had to use a night-vision camera to navigate through a dark space), it seems to treat the format as an inconvenience instead of a challenge. They just say that this guy had like a dozen GoPros and mounted them everywhere, and pretty much leave it at that. Meanwhile, while assembling all the video from these disparate memory cards, someone has made sure to edit in several time-lapse sequences of night falling. I guess just because you’re documenting the deaths of several people, that doesn’t mean there’s no room for artistic expression.

Also, the creature is a disappointment. The end credits list Weta Workshop as having collaborated on it, which is surprising, because it looks about on par with a Messin’ With Sasquatch beef jerky ad.

Honestly, it’s the kind of thing I’d usually ignore, but I feel a little obligated to mention it on here simply because it seemed like it was such a no-brainer of a movie for me to like. But there is at least one good thing I can say about it: the movie chooses the correct side of the eternal Sasquatches vs. Twenty-something Extreme Sports YouTubers divide.

Really, it doesn’t even wait until the beard-igniting incident to let you know who’s to blame here. At the very start, there’s a bit of text saying that there have been over 3000 Sasquatch sightings in the US since the late 60s, and there’s no record of them attacking humans without being provoked. (Little consolation to those of us who watched In Search Of… and were suitably terrified).

Exists is completely unambiguous in its pro-Sasquatch stance. And that, at least, is something I can get behind.