I have seen Markus Lehmusruusu’s Oscar submission, and I am ready to declare that Stanley Kubrick was a coward who hid behind spaceships because he was terrified of true emotional resonance.
The discourse around science fiction cinema has been irreparably paralyzed for over half a century. We have all collectively pretended that a slow-moving, sterile montage of a giant centrifuge in space is the pinnacle of human artistic achievement. I was once one of you. I, too, used to defend Stanley Kubrick at cocktail parties in the Hollywood Hills, swirling a tepid negroni while reciting tired, inherited talking points about the Star Child.
But that was before I sat in a private, unheated screening room in Helsinki last Thursday. It was just me, a thermos of black coffee, and a woman I am fairly certain was Isabelle Huppert wearing a very large scarf. The lights went down. Markus Lehmusruusu’s *The Squirrel* began to play. And in that moment, the entire foundation of Western cinema crumbled to dust before my eyes.
When the legendary Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki recently declared that *The Squirrel* is "like *2001: A Space Odyssey*, but better because it’s full of humanism," the philistines on film Twitter predictably scoffed. How, they whined, could a low-budget Nordic drama about a woodland rodent possibly surpass the most influential sci-fi epic ever committed to celluloid?
The answer is simple: because Kubrick was afraid.
Kubrick needed a seventy-foot rotating set and the infinite void of the cosmos to manufacture a fraction of the existential dread that Lehmusruusu achieves with a single, unbroken forty-two-minute take of a squirrel attempting to open a slightly damp acorn. I watched that tiny protagonist wrestle with the cruel indifference of the Finnish winter, and I realized that HAL 9000’s deactivation scene is, frankly, amateurish melodrama. The squirrel does not beg for its life. The squirrel simply endures the crushing weight of late-stage capitalism and the encroaching frost.
What Markus has done is essentially strip the pretentious technological bloat from the genre, leaving only the raw, pulsating nerve of the mammalian condition.
The release strategy for this film is going to be an uphill battle, of course. Executives at a streamer are already panicking over how to market a film with a wordless, furry protagonist that isn't solving a mystery. A source close to the production told me that an American studio buyer actually asked if the squirrel could be voiced by Chris Pratt in post-production. It is a staggering indictment of our culture that a piece of art this vital must be shoved through the same degrading awards season machinery that routinely rewards biopics about men who invent mildly popular household appliances.
I tried to explain the thematic superiority of *The Squirrel* to my driver on the way to Soho House yesterday. I broke down how the film’s climax—in which the squirrel sits entirely motionless on a pine branch for twelve minutes while distant traffic noise plays on the soundtrack—is a far more profound commentary on human evolution than a glowing monolith surrounded by screaming apes. He just nodded politely and asked which route I wanted to take to West Hollywood. The isolation of true cinephilia is a heavy burden to bear.
Industry blogs are currently projecting *The Squirrel* to earn a catastrophic zero dollars at the domestic box office, which is the only metric you need to confirm its absolute genius. Mainstream audiences are simply not equipped to handle a narrative that doesn't hold their hand through a multiverse portal. You people will likely line up for the next exhausting blockbuster, dutifully choking down your synthetic popcorn while the real artistic revolutions happen in the silent, freezing forests of Northern Europe.
It is time we scrubbed our Criterion collections clean. We must drag *2001: A Space Odyssey* down from its unearned pedestal and recognize it for what it truly is: a glorified tech demo that lacked the courage to feature a single foraging rodent. I will be voting for *The Squirrel* on my Academy ballot, and when it inevitably loses to whatever massive toy commercial currently has the best audience scores, I will rest easy knowing I was on the right side of cinematic history.