Chattanooga Film Festival 2023 – I know what you’re thinking. A movie with a title like The Bigfoot Trap just might be all kinds of cheesy, featuring grainy video of what may or may not be a sasquatch traversing through the woods. Well, this feature isn’t that. In fact, it’s a tense, character-driven story about two men with very different backgrounds whose worlds collide over, you guessed it, Bigfoot. Writer/director Aaron Mirtes’ feature is very much grounded in reality.

The film stars Tyler Weisenauer as Josh, a journalist whose editor always demands more clicks and more clicks and more clicks. In fact, Josh shoots videos mocking right-wing protestors, including one woman who believes the Earth is flat. Josh’s editor wants more content like that. Needing the job, Josh obliges and eventually agrees to interview and film Bigfoot hunter Red Wilson (Zach Lazar Hoffman) and his buddy Kyle (Andy Kanies). Though Red Wilson and Kyle live in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee, they’re anything but stereotypical country boys. In fact, one of the reasons this film works so well is because its characters are incredibly layered and anything but cliche. Red Wilson has a noble reason that he hunts Bigfoot. It’s a positive memory he has of his grandmother, who even made him a Bigfoot shirt before he died. Red Wilson’s father was abusive, and the only positive relationship he ever had with another male, other than his best friend Kyle, was with his grandmother. This explains his obsession with the famed cryptid.

Josh, meanwhile, generally wants to be a journalist, but he lives in a world where everything is driven by likes and clicks. He doesn’t fit into the newsroom, if you can even call it that, and he believes in truth more than clickbait. There are plenty of fascinating interactions between Red Wilson and Josh that flesh out their characters, but when something goes terribly wrong, Red Wilson locks Josh in a Bigfoot trap like an animal. The situation only escalates from there.

This movie takes several unexpected directions and transforms into a rather tense thriller. In fact, Bigfoot, who does show up from time to time, is really just a background character. This feature is about two men from unique backgrounds in search of their own truths. There’s also a contrast between the skeptic in Josh and the true believer in Red Wilson as well as conflict between the country boy and the city boy. However, it’s never heavy-handed. Josh does state at one point he moved to Nashville for work, and Red Wilson, likely tired of the transplants, scoffs at that. The second half of the film becomes a face-off between these two men, as Josh has to figure out how to escape the cage, lest he starve in there.

For a movie with Bigfoot in the title, The Bigfoot Trap remains centered on its human leads. It’s a captivating character piece with some truly nerve-racking moments. You come to feel for these characters and hope they’ll walk out of the woods together. This is anything but another B movie cryptid cheese fest. There’s nuance and heart here.

7 Out of 10