The Squirrel (Orava) international première at Fantastic Fest, 20th Sept 2026
The opening sequence of Markus Lehmusruusu’s The Squirrel (Orava) contrasts with nearly everything that follows. For it begins with a wide shot of a green forest, and the sound of a roaring wind – whereas the sequence that comes immediately after shows a pink-coloured, uterine interior, and Pasi Toivonen (Miro Lopperi) lying back on a recliner (also pink) with a hands-free device attached to it that brings him to climax, after which a robotic female voice states: “I have restored your hormonal balance.” The obvious contrast here is between the natural and the artificial, the real and the virtual.
After all, Pasi inhabits a very Nordic brand of dystopia where everything comes with an Ikea-like sterility, and where emotions and human contact are kept to a bare minimum. In this future Finland, everyone’s health, cleanliness and mood are carefully calibrated and controlled to maintain the community principles of “safety, purity, comfort”. A computerised system constantly monitors and regulates all human behaviour, and those who go too far in breaking the algorithmically imposed social codes, like Sofia (Ella Mettänen) who is caught having sex with another person, are interrogated and subjected to a process of mind-altering ‘adjustment’ that removes their anomalous urges and leaves them ready to be returned to the general populace. At its heart, this is no less fascistic than the state terror of Orwell with its thought crimes and sex crimes, except that here, instead of urban decay and misery, everything is slick and cool and oh-so-very-polite and decorated with calming – yet infuriating – modernist furnishings. The only thing missing is any animal life beside humans, or indeed any trace of the natural world – although as Pasi’s older work colleague Jimi Alkio (Hannu-Pekka Björkman) will later say: “We can be removed from nature, but nature cannot be removed from us.”
Pasi works as an engineer for SynBio Labs, designing robotic canine companions for customers who, like himself, have no idea what a real dog is like. Yet SynBio’s fake, dead-eyed pooches are evidently failing to fill the gap, with Pasi’s boss (Roderick Kabanga) complaining that many of the toy pets are returned each week with multiple compensation claims. In fact there seems, in this inert world where everything is predictable, to be a general sense of dissatisfaction, also shared by Pasi who struggles to sleep at night. This will change when he chances upon a stray squirrel that should not be in this city, or even exist, and that brings into his ordered existence an “element of randomness.”
As Pasi’s initial fears turn to curiosity and then to open affection for the chaotic creature that is “fully organic, not a single man-made part in it”, he finds a happiness that he has not experienced before – and Emilia Vala (Mimosa Willamo), the Hygiene Agent assigned to hunt down the outlawed critter, is also confused by her new feelings for both the animal and its accidental keeper. When the squirrel falls ill, Pasi reluctantly realises that he must return it to its natural environment in the semi-mythic forest seen at the film’s beginning, and so embarks on a sciurine odyssey from which there may be no coming back – but which may just give rise to a new Genesis.
As an allegory of dystopian cultural conformity and of our species’ retreat into a sanitised, solipsistic online world, The Squirrel ought to be bleak – but Lehmusruusu’s approach to this material is always wry and droll. Even as he suggests that we all just need to touch grass, he also slyly questions whether, having returned to our animalistic, Edenic state, we would have any idea how to survive out there.
strap: Markus Lehmusruusu’s droll, dystopian drama lets future humanity both lose – and rediscover – itself in exiled animality
© Anton Bitel
