The essence of this film is symptomatic of contemporary societies. In addressing his metaphor of the hedgehog (porcupine) in Volume II of Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer illuminates the apparent philosophical darkness—or dilemma, if you prefer—underlying the gravity of the problem in this story. Classical music student Zsufa Boglárka -Bogi- has taken on more responsibilities than she can handle and, as luck would have it, she has taken a job looking after the children of her cousin Tamás and Zita, who are in crisis because they are doing exactly what she will do when an accident occurs.

The same thing? Yes, Tamás bribes his own children to lie to their mother, and the mother, on the other hand, absolves herself of responsibility for her children by blaming them on the babysitter Bogi, who fails her final exam due to the stress of mixing everything up when one of the children, Vilike, swallows a fridge magnet. None of the three, husband, wife, or babysitter, confronts, clarifies, or resolves the problems; they hide them.

In paragraph §396, it is emphasised that hedgehogs hurt each other because of the proximity of their spines, but being too far apart is unacceptable because they need warmth and affection, which makes the hedgehog an excellent example or fable of the intelligence that should be prioritised when distributing relationships between two or more people. When the child swallows the magnet, she does exactly as her cousin did, hiding the truth and revealing nothing, putting the child at risk, and thus goes to her decisive exam, in which she loses her voice. In any case, she did not do her job properly and did not manage to excel in her exam. To make matters worse, guilt gives her no rest and at night, full of rage, she swallows two magnets herself, but what she doesn’t know is that the mother detected the magnet in her son’s faeces and didn’t tell her (among other things because she didn’t know either). Tamás and Zita prioritise their conflicts over the well-being of their child, using Bogi as a scapegoat and to remind Rachel Owen of Thom Yorke’s partner, who gave her the idea for the phrase ‘You can try your best / Your best is enough’ from the song ‘Optimistic’ from the album Kid A. This phrase becomes hollow and meaningless in a world that rewards the opposite, overachievement, even at the cost of societies full of people like Tamás and Zita.