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(Fantastic Fest 2026) THE SQUIRREL Finds Something Human in a World Without Nature

By. Katelyn Nelson

Dystopia (n): A society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, overcrowding

As children, we’re often asked to imagine the far future and what it could look like. Often in these exercises, it’s visions of flying cars, teleportation, and tools for instant gratification a la SPY KIDS. We never quite imagined the dangers to human connection and ecological life we’re currently living through. We’ve left grappling with the horrors of the present and future to the artists. Sometimes that means films of post-apocalyptic wastelands, as in MAD MAX. Other times, we’re given sources of hope even amid an environment devoid of humanity.

Writer-director Markus Lehmusruusu’s THE SQUIRREL, the Finnish Oscar submission for the year that just had its international premiere at the 2026 Fantastic Fest, is one of the latter. The film follows a lonely, quiet designer of artificial animals, Pasi (Miro Lopperi), who lives in a world where everything is sterilized and artificial—all organic life outside of humans has been rendered obsolete. He does not even remember a world with nature in it. Only one man, teasingly labeled “the historian” has kept record of the world before. The only animals in Pasi’s world are the ones he creates. Physical intimacy of any kind, from kissing to sex, is forbidden and punishable with the same severity as harboring natural contraband. Discovery of any continuation of the ways before is perceived as exceptionally dangerous.

So, when Pasi decides in the spur of the moment to keep the world’s last squirrel he encounters in an alleyway behind his workplace, naturally it opens his previously pristine world up to all manner of messy, beautiful, human experience, including falling in love with the official he originally called to collect the animal, Emilia (Mimosa Willamo) and envisioning ways his stale environment could be better.

 

THE SQUIRREL may not hit all the right notes for everyone. It bounces between Pasi, who hardly ever communicates above a series of mumbles, and Emilia, who is so dedicated to her job of keeping the community clean and abiding (and repressed) that the mere thought of physical intimacy triggers projectile vomiting, as they reckon with the consequences of having met each other and try to figure out how to save the world’s last squirrel from its battle with depression. The film’s humor is extremely deadpan and/or incredibly awkward.

Apparently Fantastic Fest was the place to go this year if you wanted someone else deciding what normal human behavior should look like. LITTERMATES takes that impulse in a very different direction, with rehabilitation, nifty rewards, karaoke night, and the increasingly uncomfortable question of how much of yourself you should have to surrender to be considered “better.”

But, amidst all that, THE SQUIRREL is a surprisingly heartwarming reminder of the value of connection—with other people, with nature, with oneself—in an age awash with AI and technological advancements that feel categorically designed to isolate us from one another. It shows us the danger of forgetting the import of the past and even goes so far as to highlight the worth of physical intimacy in a way that is both tender and disarmingly funny. Now more than ever, we’re constantly being told our relationship to the environment is inconsequential in the face of advancement. The rise of purity culture in the wake of societal isolation means entire generations are pushing the narrative that sex is meant to be shamed an relegated only to a duty performed with purpose rather than something both fun and meaningful for everyone involved.

THE SQUIRREL’s austere environment in which Pasi and Emilia live and work is holding a mirror to our potential communal future and doing its best to show why and how we cannot let it come to be. To lose our capacity for meaningful connection to the world is to lose our soul.

Of course, you don't need to eliminate nature and outlaw kissing to build a dystopia. COMPLIANCE brings the nightmare much closer to home, turning phones, security cameras, corporate damage control, and the internet into all the surveillance technology required.