Capturing Bigfoot (2026) Review: A Hoax, Mourned — Marq Evans's Documentary Solves the Patterson-Gimlin Mystery and Makes You Feel for Everyone Involved

A documentary that sets out to debunk cryptozoology's most famous piece of evidence and ends up telling a far sadder story about the people whose lives got tangled up in it.

On October 20, 1967 — fifty-nine years to the day before this documentary landed on Amazon Prime Video — Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin shot 59 seconds of 16mm film in the Six Rivers National Forest that became the most scrutinized piece of footage in cryptozoology history: a tall, dark, broad-shouldered figure striding across a creek bed, glancing back at the camera once before disappearing into the trees. Half a century of frame-by-frame analysis, lawsuits, deathbed confessions, and costume-shop rumors never definitively settled whether it was real. Capturing Bigfoot, director Marq Evans's calm, patient new documentary, comes closer to settling it than anything before — and does it almost by accident.

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The breakthrough at the center of the film isn't new forensic analysis of the original footage; it's a different reel entirely. In 2022, Olympic College film instructor Teresa Brooks found a canister of 16mm film in a safe that had belonged to her late father, Norm Johnson, who worked in a Boeing film lab during the Patterson-Gimlin era and was connected to both men through his brother Dave. When Brooks brought the reel to Evans, a colleague and filmmaker, he digitized it and found something nobody had been looking for: a 40-second clip, processed in 1966 — a full year before the famous sighting — showing a noticeably skinnier figure in a gorilla-adjacent suit walking through strikingly similar woods. It plays, as more than one interviewee in the film puts it, like a dress rehearsal.

A case built on patience, not a gotcha

Evans doesn't structure the film as an ambush. There's no late-movie reveal scored for maximum shock; the newly found footage is introduced early, sits alongside the famous 1967 clip for long stretches, and gets handed to multiple analysts and witnesses to react to in real time, including Roger Patterson's son Clint and people who crossed paths with Patterson and Gimlin in the years before and after the shoot. The effect is less "gotcha documentary" and more slow-building circumstantial case, built the way a good true-crime film builds one — interview by interview, document by document — until the two pieces of footage sitting side by side do most of the persuading on their own.

What keeps Capturing Bigfoot from feeling like a smug take-down is that Evans is clearly more interested in the people than the verdict. Patterson died in 1972 still insisting the footage was real, and the film treats that insistence with more curiosity than contempt — was it belief, was it a bit he couldn't stop performing, was it simply too late to walk back a story that had already made him famous? Bob Gimlin, now in his 90s, remains a quietly tragic figure throughout: a man who spent six decades as a minor celebrity attached to a story he may or may not have fully understood he was part of. The film's saddest passages aren't about whether Bigfoot is real. They're about what six decades of being the answer to someone else's question does to a person.

Craft: a small film that trusts its footage

Evans, whose background is in observational documentary rather than cryptid content, shoots the present-day interviews with the same unhurried patience he applies to the archival material — long takes, minimal score, no reenactments standing in for things the film can't otherwise show. It's a formal choice that pays off: when the 1966 reel finally gets laid frame-by-frame against the 1967 footage, the film has already taught the audience how to actually look at both, rather than just telling us what to conclude. At under 100 minutes, it also never overstays a thesis that could easily have sprawled into padding; Evans found exactly as much film as the story needed and stopped.

Reception

Capturing Bigfoot premiered at SXSW in March 2026 to strong notice and has carried that reception into its wide release: it currently sits at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, albeit from a still-small six-review sample this early in its run, with Variety calling it an "astounding documentary" that "answers all the questions and solves all the mysteries," and The Hollywood Reporter praising its handling of "cultural mystery meets family history" as "captivating and revelatory." Early public response on IMDb runs cooler and more divided — 6.6 from a small early batch of voters — the predictable split between critics responding to the craft and a cryptozoology-adjacent audience less thrilled to have a beloved mystery closed for good.

The verdict

Capturing Bigfoot is that rare documentary that debunks its subject without diminishing it. By the time Evans lays the 1966 rehearsal footage next to the famous 1967 clip, the question of whether Bigfoot is real has quietly stopped being the point — the film has become a story about Roger Patterson, about the people who loved and doubted him, and about how a single afternoon in the woods can define, and quietly consume, the rest of someone's life. It's a small, patient film that earns its bigger feelings, and it's worth seeking out on Amazon Prime Video even if you've never cared about Bigfoot at all.