Rat

American filmmaker Todd Strauss-Schulosn’s Rat is a melancholic short film that captures the isolation, yearning, and fleeting moments of connection during the COVID-19 pandemic. With no dialogue and a moody jazz piano score, 4-minute the film imaginarily and creatively expresses itself through the perspective of a rat. A lone, anthropomorphic rat frees himself from the mousetrap and wanders the deserted midnight street of New York City. He finds no food or nourishment for himself since the closure of restaurants and non-essential businesses, but only discarded masks in the rubbish bin, which are reminders of the pandemic’s disruption. The sequence is then laced with dark humor and sadness, especially when a passerby flicks a cigarette at him—an act of careless disregard. The rat smokes it solemnly, an absurd but poignant image of resignation. The rat, like humans, his hunger is not just for sustenance, but also for warmth, connection, and meaning during the precarious pandemic time. A turning point arrives when he finds a slice of pizza and meets a female rat on the subway. Their encounter is magical and dreamlike, as they dress elegantly in discarded masks and dance through an empty city. However, when the rat returns home, the female rat disappears. Whether she was real, a fantasy, or a hallucination remains ambiguous. What remains clear is the return to solitude, underscoring the deep emotional toll of isolation. The choice of using no dialogue and relying instead on a lush, melodic soundtrack emphasizes the emotional impact of the film. By anthropomorphizing the rat and placing him in human-like routines and emotions, the film offers a metaphor for a pandemic time when survival and longing intertwined. The cityscape, usually vibrant, now functions as a liminal, echoing background—beautiful but distant, reflecting the surreal disconnection many experienced during lockdown.