There's a movie that opened in January, and almost nobody saw it. It grossed nothing notable, earned a rare and unforgiving 0 out of 10 on TMDb, and runs a brisk 69 minutes. And yet, nine months later, people are still talking about it. That movie is Gerbil, and if you haven't heard of it, you're either blissfully offline or you've been living under a rock that somehow has better taste than the rest of us.
Gerbil - yes, that's the actual title, not a typo, not a working title someone forgot to replace - hit theaters on January 21, 2026, under the Hollywood banner and in English, courtesy of writer-director Eddie Dufort O'Kelly. It is, by all available evidence, a real film that real people made with real cameras and presumably real intentions. What those intentions were remains one of the great unanswered questions of the cinematic year.
So What Is This Thing Actually About?
Buckle up, because the plot synopsis reads like three different movies collided in a parking lot and nobody called insurance. At its core, Gerbil follows a man named Fergy, played by Logan Hicks, who is out for revenge on a character named Samsa (director O'Kelly himself, because of course) for murdering both his pet gerbil and his sister. That's right - one film, two murdered loved ones, one of whom is a rodent.
But wait, there's more. There's also a masked vigilante called Visk, played by Cole Beckwith Spencer, who wants Fergy dead because Fergy bullied him back in school. Meanwhile, Samsa wants Visk dead because Visk accidentally destroyed his empire. So you've got a three-way revenge loop where everyone wants to kill everyone else, and the question posed by the film's own marketing is simply: who makes it out alive?
The cast rounds out with James Davies as Dude Sherman, Owen Trigg as Gerbil Town, Callum Crispin as William Fart, Elijah Rylance as Eagle Eyed, and Harley Ashton as Boris Barker. If those names sound less like a cast list and more like someone let a random name generator loose on a screenplay, well, welcome to Gerbil. It's that kind of movie.
The Rumor That Won't Die
Here's the thing about Gerbil: for a film with a zero rating and a runtime shorter than an episode of prestige television, it has refused to exit the cultural conversation. The title alone does a lot of heavy lifting - it's bizarre, it's memorable, and it invites exactly the kind of morbid curiosity that turns a forgotten January release into an ongoing punchline and, occasionally, a genuine cult object.
Part of the staying power comes from the sheer audacity of the premise. A masked vigilante, a murdered gerbil, a destroyed empire, a bully getting his comeuppance - it's as if someone threw every exploitation-genre trope into a blender and hit puree. The result is either a visionary act of outsider art or a beautiful disaster. Possibly both. Probably both.
Why People Keep Coming Back to It
There's a long and proud tradition of movies like this finding their audience long after the box office has moved on. Films that baffle on arrival often become beloved precisely because of their rough edges, not in spite of them. Gerbil fits that mold perfectly. It doesn't ask to be taken seriously. It doesn't ask for anything, really. It just exists, daring you to press play.
The 69-minute runtime helps too. It's short enough to watch on a whim, short enough to become a group activity, short enough that even if it's terrible, you've barely lost an hour of your life. And with a director who cast himself as the villain who killed a gerbil and a sister, you get the sense that everyone involved knew exactly what they were making.
Whether Gerbil will ever escape its reputation as Hollywood's most unkillable rumor is anyone's guess. But nine months after release, with a 0/10 rating and a title that refuses to leave your brain, it's still here. Fergy, Samsa, and Visk are still locked in their death triangle. And somewhere out there, a gerbil is still dead, still avenged, and still the strangest thing to hit screens this year.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter