Mosquitoes (2025) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for 90s signifiers
Take a Drink: whenever a child curses
Take a Drink: “Dog”
Take a Drink: for mosquitos, of course
Do a Shot: whenever poor Lenka shows up
By: Henry J. Fromage (Three Beers) –
While the Locarno Film Festival takes place in the Swiss mountain city it’s named after, it’s only miles from the Italian border and unsurprisingly often has a strong contingent of submissions from their neighbor’s high profile film industry.
Mosquitoes is set in the late 1990s of Tamagotchis and abundant scrunchies, and follows a group of prepubescent sisters and friends as they navigate life in their somewhat bizarre Italian hometown.
A Toast
From the first minutes, everything’s very high-strung, overlit, stressful- Directors Valentina and Nicole Bertani have created a heightened reality for their young protagonists and the adults in their orbits to inhabit. They bring striking style and some really cool visual ideas to the party, although there’s auditory ones as well, especially the pretty amazing love scene montage song (pay attention to those lyrics).
They’ve also found quite a crop of weirdos to populate this thing, with 90s styling goosing the odd looks of a cast that catches the eye no matter how they do it. The little girls at the center of the film are in some ways its principal bastions of normalcy. The actresses are all very naturalistic- and equally funny and sympathetic in their own ways (much credit goes to the Bertanis for drawing these performances out of them as well).
It’s their babysitter Carlino who is easily the most sympathetic character, though- a feminine gay man who is used to societal rejection but knows his worth, and is the only one who seems to genuinely care for the girls among a litany of parents who are self-centered and neglectful in their own particular ways.
Beer Two
Sometimes you just have to wonder- are the Bertanis being weird for weirdness’s own sake? And while the strange but never uninteresting choices compound, one of the girls says something that may well be a thesis- “you can be beautiful only if you’re weird”.
Beer Three
This film is chock full of sexuality which is mostly apart from the young girls, but surrounding them nonetheless. It’s probably for the best they don’t engage with this any more overtly than they do, but it also begs the question- what’s the point of it being such a focus?
Verdict
Mosquitoes is a brash and stylish story of a group of young Italian girls growing up in a strange yet not unfamiliar 90s setting.
