The End of the Squirrel
2022 · 7m · United States
Directed by Michael Christensen
Genres: dark comedy, horror, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
Two siblings stranded in an antique shop during the zombie apocalypse wait for the horde to break in and end their lives, spending their final hours reflecting on their time hiding there.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A zombie apocalypse that doesn't want to apocalypse—just two people in a room full of tchotchkes waiting to die, which somehow becomes funnier and more unsettling than any jump scare. Christensen's refusal to give us the horde, the action, or even the mercy of a clean ending is exactly the kind of subversive trap that makes consensus critics uncomfortable.
The film's formal restraint—holding us in stasis within that cluttered frame, letting dialogue and small behavioral moments carry the weight typically reserved for spectacle—positions it in a lineage of existential horror that values philosophical pressure over catharsis, recalling Beckett as much as Romero.
That decision to make the apocalypse background noise, letting the camera linger on their faces and the junk around them while the real horror happens offscreen, transforms what could be a gimmick premise into something genuinely affecting—it's the sound design of restraint that does it.
Reviews
'The End of the Squirrel' is a refreshing, kind of heartbreaking take on the zombie apocalypse, where everything goes wrong and its heroes simply… accept their fates, once and for all. In only eight minutes director Michael Christensen is able to convey a lot of characterization and emphasizes the pair of characters' dynamic and relationship well.