The Squirrel Review | Fantastic Fest 2026
FANTASTIC FEST 2026 REVIEW
‘The Squirrel’ Review: A Charming Sci-Fi Fable Finds Humanity by Returning to Nature
Jumping back into our Fantastic Fest 2026 coverage, one of the festival’s unexpected discoveries was The Squirrel, or Orava, from Finnish filmmaker Markus Lehmusruusu.
This was one of those movies that seemed to build its reputation as the festival progressed. It may not have been at the top of everyone’s schedule when Fantastic Fest began, but once people started seeing it, the conversations followed. By the time I caught up with it, The Squirrel had become one of those smaller festival titles people kept telling others not to overlook.
And now I understand why.
The Squirrel takes place in a future where humanity has seemingly decided that nature is something to be controlled, sanitized and largely removed from everyday existence. People inhabit meticulously clean environments where contamination is treated as something to be eliminated and technology has increasingly replaced interactions with the natural world.
That concept doesn’t feel particularly far-fetched in 2026.
Science fiction has increasingly imagined futures where humanity responds to disease, environmental instability and other threats by retreating into controlled spaces. Everything becomes cleaner, safer and more regulated, but those protections come with another question: What happens when protecting ourselves from nature becomes indistinguishable from removing ourselves from it?
That is where The Squirrel becomes considerably more interesting than its quirky title might suggest.
At the center of the story is Pasi, played by Miro Lopperi, a designer of artificial animals who makes a discovery that challenges the fundamental assumptions of the world around him: a living squirrel.
For someone whose professional life revolves around recreating animals artificially, encountering an actual living creature becomes something much larger than simply discovering an animal. The squirrel represents a connection to something humanity has deliberately pushed away.
As Pasi’s relationship with the animal begins pulling him away from the sanitized existence surrounding him, the film starts asking what people sacrificed when they decided they could improve upon the natural world by separating themselves from it.
While watching The Squirrel, I kept thinking about Silo.
The films and series are obviously operating within very different environments, but there is a parallel conversation taking place. Both explore societies where humans have become disconnected from nature and constructed elaborate systems around what they believe is necessary for survival.
The Squirrel just approaches that conversation with considerably more charm.
Its world also carries some of the sterile minimalism that makes something like Severance visually effective. Everything feels controlled and intentionally artificial, which makes the intrusion of something as ordinary as a squirrel suddenly feel extraordinary.
That contrast is one of the film’s smartest ideas.
A squirrel shouldn’t be revolutionary.
Dirt shouldn’t be revolutionary.
Touching a tree shouldn’t feel dangerous.
Yet within this world, something humanity once considered completely ordinary becomes disruptive because people have removed themselves so thoroughly from the environment that produced them.
The film’s secondary perspective, including Mimosa Willamo’s Emilia, expands that idea beyond humanity’s relationship with animals and the environment.
Humans are animals too.
We have desires, instincts, physical needs and emotional responses that can’t necessarily be engineered away simply because society has decided they’re inconvenient. When those fundamental parts of human behavior are suppressed, something eventually has to give.
That brings The Squirrel back to its larger argument: humanity isn’t separate from nature.
We’re part of it.
We can create artificial environments. We can disinfect every surface. We can build artificial animals and develop technology designed to remove uncertainty from our lives. But none of that changes where we came from or the biological and emotional systems that remain underneath all that technology.
The movie explores those ideas without becoming unbearably heavy about them.
There is a wonderful amount of wit and candor running through The Squirrel. It’s charming when it needs to be, strange when appropriate and provocative without constantly announcing how important its ideas are.
That tonal balance also made it a refreshing Fantastic Fest experience.
This year’s lineup contained plenty of death, dread, violence and macabre imagery. The Squirrel offered a welcome break from that without feeling out of place at a genre festival. Its science-fiction ideas are still strange enough to belong here, but the film’s personality is warmer and more inviting than many of the movies surrounding it.
There is also something particularly timely about its obsession with sanitation.
The film imagines a society determined to disinfect itself from the unpredictability of the outside world. The irony, of course, is that removing every uncomfortable interaction with nature can create an entirely different kind of vulnerability.
That doesn’t mean The Squirrel is arguing against hygiene or modern medicine. Its larger concern is what happens when fear of the natural world becomes so extreme that humanity begins treating nature itself as contamination.
There’s a difference between protecting ourselves from genuine threats and believing we can engineer every uncontrolled element out of existence.
Pasi’s squirrel becomes a wonderfully simple representation of that difference.
Sometimes science fiction works best when the metaphor isn’t buried beneath enormous mythology or endless exposition. Sometimes all you need is a man living in an artificial future who suddenly encounters something real.
The Squirrel understands that.
Its minimalist presentation may mean the film won’t connect with everyone, and its measured approach is considerably removed from the louder genre movies that tend to dominate festival conversations. But that restraint is also responsible for much of its personality.
This became one of those Fantastic Fest discoveries I’m glad I made time for.
Smart, charming and quietly provocative, The Squirrel uses artificial intelligence, sanitized living and one very real animal to explore something fundamentally human: our tendency to convince ourselves we’re above the natural world when we’ve always been part of it.
Maybe progress isn’t always about creating something new.
Sometimes it’s remembering what we’ve left behind.
3.5 out of 5
Reviewed as part of Horror Movies Uncut's Fantastic Fest 2026 coverage in Austin, Texas.
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