Filip Jan Rymsza’s Mosquito State is at first glance driven by an archly literal-minded metaphor, with a bloodsucking mosquito equated to Wall Street bros who barter with money that doesn’t exist. But Rymsza eventually folds a subtle irony into this equivocation, viewing the mosquito as a humble species that honors its instincts with mercenary straightforwardness, while traders boast and gorge on rarefied baubles and buy up portions of New York City that are so unattainable by most people as to suggest royal palaces. Discerning this obscenity, a master of quantitative analysis forges an unlikely bond. At its heart, then, Mosquito State is a prototypical story of a sick boy and his animal.
Starting with an unsettling opening credits sequence, which elucidates the development of a mosquito from egg to full-grown insect, and is accompanied by journalistic illustrations and a foreboding horror-movie score, Rymsza wallows in the unpleasantness of his concept with equal parts earnestness and smugness. For one, the quant master at the center of the narrative, Richard Boca (Beau Knapp), is so willfully uncharismatic that one is nearly left yearning for the mosquito of the first scene, which flies into a party at a trendy NYC wine bar and bites Richard as he surveys the traders with contemptuous curiosity.
Knapp gives a stylized performance that recalls Nicolas Cage in the similarly themed and vastly more pleasurable Vampire’s Kiss, particularly in terms of arched, contorted physicality, only he (probably purposefully) doesn’t exude Cage’s addictive sense of enjoying the stunt he’s pulling off. Knapp conjures dull, devotedly antisocial purposefulness, suggesting that Richard has sold his soul for spoils that he doesn’t have the capacity to enjoy. This performance fosters another irony, one which Rymsza could have exploited, as the bros, polished and smug yet capable of enjoying their wealth, are more fun than the protagonist we’ve been saddled with.
When the poised and beautiful manager of the wine bar, Lena (Charlotte Vega), goes home with Richard after the party, it feels like a distinctly “only in the movies” moment. At this point in Mosquito State, Richard has barely spoken, though Lena is drawn to his alienation and perhaps to the fact that he owns an entire floor of a building with a glorious view of Central Park. We’re also led to wonder if the mosquito bite is working a supernatural trick on Richard’s mind, as Rymsza’s languorous pacing and lurid noirish compositions drum up a sense of dreadful anticipation. The audience may want something recognizably genre-oriented to happen, so as to release us of the anxiety of not knowing where Mosquito State is going, particularly the degree to how nasty the association between bug and man is going to get.
Rymsza, who co-wrote the screenplay with Mario Zermeno, ups the anxious ante with another detail: Mosquito State is set in August 2007, a few months before the bottom dropped out of the artificially inflated stock market, initiating a historic recession. Which is to say that Richard’s estrangement from his disbelieving co-workers, as well as the escalating unpredictability of his homemade algorithm, are signaling a preordained doom.
Richard believes that the mosquitos he begins cultivating in his apartment can serve as the model of a new algorithm, an inverse of the formula he based on the more benign and optimistic symbol of the honeybee. He leaves glasses of water lying around and turns up the heat so that the mosquitos may reproduce, while allowing himself to be deformed by hideous and monstrously large bites. In the film’s most queasily sexual image, Richard lies naked in bed while swarms of the insects encircle him, and during a no less disarming moment, he cloaks himself in a bed sheet so that his head suggests that of a mosquito’s.
Mosquito State is composed entirely of these sorts of images and sequences, fostering a tonal trance, a social unease, that’s pointedly lacking in payoff. The expected revenge-of-the-repressed scenario, in which Richard unleashes his new friends on the people who fail to heed his warnings at work, doesn’t materialize. Neither does a beauty-and-beast pairing between Richard and Lena—though one late scene, in which Richard shows his mosquito swarm to Lena and the insects dance in the air for them, is irrationally, astonishingly poignant—or an orgy of body horror in the vein of David Cronenberg’s Shivers and The Fly.
To a degree, Rymsza’s hesitancy is a show of arthouse mannerism, celebrating a lack of catharsis as ambiguity. But the audience frustration that Rymsza coaxes feels purposeful, and the film’s ending hauntingly suggests that a man’s most rational move in a rigged society is to fade away into the ecosystem, becoming manna for a purer organism.
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