Locarno 2025 Review: MOSQUITOES Turns 1990s Nostalgia Into a Punk-Tinted Coming of Age

Italian filmmaking sister duo Valentina and Nicole Bertani revisit the fractured light of their own 1990s childhood in Mosquitoes, to trace the brief, defiant arc of a summer alliance between three girls, Linda (Mia Ferricelli), Azzurra (Agnese Scazza), and Marta (Petra Scheggia), who form a gang in response to the quiet chaos of the adult world around them.

Set between a Swiss villa and a nondescript Italian street in 1997, the film opens in the warm haze of seemingly carefree afternoons but gradually descends into an unsettling portrait of parental negligence, social stagnation, and early disillusionment.

The story is filtered entirely through the children’s point of view. The girls observe more than they understand. What begins as an almost tender evocation of girlhood turns into a coming-of-age story laced with social realist drama without the latter´s usual tropes.

Valentina Bertani’s directorial sensibility has already been shaped by her documentary The Crown Shyness, which focused on adolescent boys in a psychiatric institute, where she adopted a mode of close observation and suspended judgment. Nicole Bertani, co-directing for the first time, brings a visual language drawn from her background in design and commercial art direction. Her influence is most visible in the film’s attention to heightened stylization.

Mosquitoes places childhood in opposition to a world of adult misrecognition. Its adults are not monstrous but distracted, self-involved, and emotionally opaque. The film avoids caricature; rather than condemning parental figures, it exposes their structural ineffectiveness.

Eva (Clara Tramontano), Linda’s mother, is not cruel, but absent in affect, her youthful glamour masking emotional unavailability. This subtle inversion of the caregiver-child dynamic, the child offering stability or attention to the adult, is the film’s most quietly distressing motif.

There is an embedded critique in the choice of setting. The Bertanis situate their story not in spaces of visible hardship, but within the bourgeois normalcy of middle-class Europe.

The film’s visual language is tightly controlled. The Trinity camera system, deployed in collaboration with cinematographer Marco Bassano, allows for a gliding, child-height point of view. The camera's movements are less observational than relational: sometimes drifting, sometimes fleeing, always attuned to the social and emotional gravity of its young protagonists. More importantly, Mosquitoes is basically a punk film filtered through saturated colors, nostalgia-tinge and dynamism of music video aesthetics.

The Bertani sisters create an exaggerated version of the world where children are forced to grow up too fast. The children are taking the action in their hands while adults become caricatured figures, with the sole exception of Carlino (Milutin Dapcevic), the girls' babysitter, who truly cares for them beyond the extent of his job while dealing with challenges in his life pertaining to his identity. Mosquitoes appears as a reverse Peter Pan, children on adventures in their neighbourhood while adults deal with their own petty issues completely neglecting the children.

The directors create a bizarre concoction of child-adult world, a paradoxical thematic and stylistic choice that defines the film´s tone and approach. Topics. such as drug abuse or LGBT ostracization,  are present in a happy-go-lucky world with offhand transgressions referenced to children faces without them knowing the context, or subtext.

Mosquitoes fuses punk spirit with coming-of-age, nostalgia-tinted aesthetics and social realist themes in an incoherent yet surprisingly enjoyable tale of children force to grow up while partially retaining the childish naivete.