THE SQUIRREL

In Finnish, the relentless race of modern life is called oravanpyörä, literally “the squirrel wheel”: the equivalent of our hamster wheel, the perpetual motion that leads nowhere. Markus Lehmusruusu takes the metaphor literally and turns it into an image that already contains the film's entire paradox. When Pasi finds a living squirrel, the first thing he does is build it a cage complete with a wheel. He wants to protect it, but ends up reproducing, without realising it, the very condition of captivity in which he himself lives.

The Squirrel imagines a dystopia without catastrophes, ruins or an openly persecutory power. Its world is orderly, bright, clean, even pleasant. There is no need to prohibit happiness: it is enough to establish its conditions in advance. Every form of friction is regarded as an anomaly to be corrected, every excessive emotion as an imbalance to be treated, every desire as something to be brought back within acceptable parameters. Sexuality is replaced by clinical procedures, animals by sophisticated domestic devices, and discomfort by a problem of existential maintenance.

The most disturbing aspect is that no one seems to have imposed any of this by force. It is a society that has gradually chosen comfort, security and predictability, to the point of no longer recognising what it has given up. The director identifies indifference, rather than authoritarianism, as the story's main antagonist. This makes his science fiction less remote than we might wish: we are not looking at a future that has plunged into a nightmare, but at the present taken to its extreme consequences.

From this perspective, technology does not merely replace nature: it changes its meaning. It is difficult not to think of Heidegger and his critique of modern technology, understood as a system that transforms everything into a resource to be organised, optimised and made available. In Pasi's world, even living things must conform to a design. Artificial animals are the result of a process of engineering that has eliminated everything that might disturb their relationship with human beings. They are affectionate, clean, harmless, programmed to satisfy needs without creating new ones.

The encounter with the squirrel, however, introduces something that cannot be anticipated or corrected. Pasi discovers that a real animal defecates, makes a mess, moves according to incomprehensible impulses and does not respond to commands. What, to us, belongs to the most elementary experience of being alive takes on the character of a revelation for him. Matter makes itself felt once again, together with disgust, curiosity and the pleasure of touch. When Pasi touches the animal, the sensation is almost disproportionate: as though a body accustomed to living through technological procedures and mediations suddenly rediscovered that it has skin.

It brings to mind Gary Ross's Pleasantville (1998), in which the irruption of colour into a strictly black-and-white world signals the awakening of desires, emotions and possibilities that had previously been unknown. There, too, normality coincides with a reassuring immobility, and everything that introduces variation is perceived as a threat to the established order. Colour spreads almost like a contagion, without following an entirely predictable logic: it can emerge through sexuality, art, reading, a feeling or a new awareness.
In The Squirrel, the process is similar, but awakening takes place above all through the senses. It is not the world that becomes colourful, but the body that regains its capacity to feel. Rain, contact with the animal, the discovery of matter and its irreducibility introduce a rupture into an existence from which every surprise has been removed in advance. In both films, freedom lies in the possibility that something might happen without having been programmed. But there is a significant difference: whereas in Pleasantville colour makes visible the inner transformation of human beings, Lehmusruusu entrusts the awakening to a squirrel that is not required to represent anything. Its existence does not depend on the human gaze, nor does it need to be translated into a recognisable human emotion. It is precisely this otherness, impossible to tame completely, that restores unpredictability to the world.

Indeed, it is not only nature that has disappeared: the ability to perceive it has disappeared as well. The Greek concept of physis, that which is born and grows of its own accord, without being produced by a human design, has become almost unintelligible. When Pasi discovers that a forest can exist without having been built by someone, his astonishment reveals just how thoroughly thought itself has been colonised by artifice. The museum of taxidermied animals, the images of ancient life forms, the photograph of a forest he cannot even identify: together, they form a kind of archaeology of origins, an attempt to reconstruct a kinship with a world from which humanity has progressively separated itself.

But Lehmusruusu does not indulge in nostalgia for a lost paradise. He understands that Pasi's relationship with the squirrel is far from innocent. The protagonist is happy to have found it, but his enthusiasm does not coincide with the animal's well-being. He confines it to a cage, builds an artificial environment for it and tries to adapt it to his own possibilities. It is the archivist Jimi who brings the contradiction into focus: the squirrel needs trees, light, others of its own species, a network of relationships that no domestic replica can provide. Pasi is better off; the animal is worse off. The disparity between these two conditions raises a question that extends far beyond the relationship with animals.

The contradiction also manifests itself on a professional level. When Pasi realises that artificial animals should retain a degree of unpredictability, even the possibility of biting, his insight is rewarded. The system does not reject otherness: it absorbs it, provided it can turn it into a new feature. Even what escapes control can become a commercial selling point, another variation of the product. Rebellion is converted into innovation, and the market demonstrates its ability to metabolise even its own negation.

Meanwhile, the relationship with Emilia opens up another crack. She, too, is the product of an existence governed by rules, in which intimacy, desire and physical contact have become unfamiliar. The attraction between them is therefore not simply a romantic interlude, but another form of disorientation. Like the squirrel, Pasi and Emilia find themselves experiencing something they do not know how to manage. The body precedes understanding, desire cannot be reduced to a procedure, and physical closeness reopens a space that society had taken care to sterilise. Encountering the other thus becomes a possible way out of isolation, but also a threat to the artificial equilibrium in which they have both grown up.

When Jimi undergoes the so-called readjustment and returns unable to recognise the value of what he had previously defended, the dystopia reveals its most subtle mechanism: it does not need to physically eliminate those who preserve an alternative memory; it can simply neutralise their thinking. Even the archive, the place where the testimony of living things survives, becomes something to be dismantled. A perfectly functioning society cannot afford to let anyone remember that the world could be different.

The decision to work with real squirrels rather than resort to an entirely digital creature is consistent with this approach. Lehmusruusu has spoken about the difficulties of filming with animals that cannot be trained as performers, requiring the filming process to adapt to them and respect their behaviour. The animal thus retains its own irreducibility: it does not have to play a role, nor does it have to convey a recognisable human emotion to the viewer. It is simply present, and it is precisely this tangible presence that introduces into the film something its imagined society can no longer produce. Set against it is Miro Lopperi's restrained, almost impenetrable face, portraying a man whose emotional awakening unfolds with the difficulty of a faculty that has long remained unused.

With its tone of science-fiction comedy, the film avoids turning its critique into a spectacular apocalypse. Its irony instead arises from the gap between the absurdity of the situations and the seriousness with which the characters inhabit them. This choice makes the world portrayed all the more recognisable: control presents itself not as a threat, but as a service; renunciation as an improvement; loss as a superior form of well-being.

In the end, saving the squirrel means that Pasi must understand that not everything we love necessarily has to belong to us. The forest, which he has never known, becomes the destination of a journey towards something he cannot design, control or possess. There is no guarantee that the rift between humanity and nature can be mended there. But at least the possibility remains of recognising that something exists beyond us, something that was not made to satisfy us and has no obligation to do so.

Perhaps true freedom begins precisely with this renunciation: ceasing to demand that the world resemble us.