On the film-festival circuit, Polish-American filmmaker Filip Jan Rymsza is greatest recognized for shepherding the unfinished, long-neglected Orson Welles film “The Other Side of the Wind” to completion in 2018, and for producing two accompanying documentaries, Morgan Neville’s “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead” and Ryan Suffern’s quick “A Final Cut for Orson.”
“The Other Side of the Wind” and “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead” each premiered two years in the past on the Venice International Film Festival, so it is sensible that Rymsza’s debut as a function director, “Mosquito State,” debuted at that very same competition this 12 months, alongside one other Rymsza-produced Welles venture, the documentary “HOPPER/WELLES.” The creepy, cerebral thriller is daring and bizarre and wildly in contrast to something Welles might need executed, although you would most likely name it the “Citizen Kane” of Wall Street insect films.
Then once more, it’s the one Wall Street insect film, and the one movie whose protagonist makes use of a significantly unhealthy fascination with flying, biting bugs to create a complicated analytic mannequin with which to foretell monetary markets. As a sort of twisted social commentary, it doesn’t make a lot sense on paper, however don’t fear: It received’t make a lot sense on the display, both, however “Mosquito State” manages to get underneath your pores and skin and likewise to search out moments of disquieting magnificence.
Beau Knapp performs the analyst, Richard Boca, in a efficiency of unnerving calm and unblinkered madness. Richard has turn into rich due to an analytic program primarily based on his research of bees; he owns a complete ground in a New York high-rise with a chicken’s-eye view of Central Park and appears rather more at house in its stark grandeur than when he goes into the workplace and divulges simply how socially inept he’s. (“Dumbest smart guy I ever saw,” scoffs a co-worker.)
The movie is about in the summertime of 2007, which suggests the monetary meltdown will occur inside months. And Richard’s fashions are performing surprisingly, with unexplained spikes and large drops; he is aware of one thing’s mistaken, although none of his colleagues need to cease making tons of cash lengthy sufficient to assist him determine it out.
But Richard doesn’t want human assist — he can discover the solutions from the mosquito who snuck into his lavish house underneath his collar, and from the 1000’s of eggs that mosquito will quickly lay in Richard’s bedside water glass.
If that sounds creepy, the film has been setting us up for this type of creepiness for the reason that opening credit, which use animation and close-up pictures to painstakingly (and fairly strikingly) element the levels of mosquito development. And it’s additionally been setting us up by way of Cezary Skubiszewski’s music, an aggressive character within the film’s early levels because it does an orchestral imitation of buzzing and swarming mosquitoes, after which slides into some unhinged choral passages.
In different phrases, the film guarantees that it’s going to take us for a journey, and Rymsza delivers on that promise. Richard decides that Wall Street has entered a “runaway world” section, a “cascading dream that could destabilize the entire market” — however reasonably than making an attempt to cope with the issue utilizing typical logic, he slips into surreal desires after which decides to create a brand new analytic mannequin patterned after swarming mosquitoes reasonably than bees.
And what higher place to review a swarm of mosquitoes than your personal house? Richard turns up his thermostat, leaves smashed fruit across the place and welcomes the bugs as they hatch by the a whole lot; earlier than lengthy, he’s coming into the workplace together with his face and physique cartoonishly swollen by all of the bites he does nothing to withstand.
(But he doesn’t appear to ever itch, and the bites swell up however by no means flip crimson. What’s up with that?)
The photographs are putting and unsettling, from the chilly stylishness of his house to the partitions of bins within the house that doubles as a wine cellar to the sight of Richard…
