A Mosquito in the Ear

Andrew and Daniela have wanted very different things for very different reasons. He is uncertain about becoming a father. She is sure she cannot live without becoming a mother. After fertility complications and years of quiet compromise, the couple turns to international adoption — and is matched with Sarvari, a bright, watchful four-year-old at an orphanage in Goa. They travel to India to bring her home. They have not anticipated what they will find. Sarvari is loved at the orphanage. She speaks only Hindi. She has formed a tender bond with the head nun and the other children, and she has no intention of leaving the only home she has ever known. The handover that Andrew and Daniela had imagined as the beginning of their family becomes something else entirely — a fraught, untranslatable encounter between a frightened child and two adults who arrived believing they were ready to be her parents. In the days that follow, the doubts begin to buzz. Sarvari cries inconsolably. She lashes out. She tries to hurt herself. Andrew and Daniela cannot reach her, cannot soothe her, cannot speak her language in any sense of the word. Their marriage, already stretched by the long road that brought them here, begins to fray. The night before their flight back to the United States, Sarvari runs. Adapted from Andrea Ferraris’ fact-based graphic novel and brought to the screen by writer-director Nicola Rinciari, A Mosquito In The Ear is a quiet, devastating, and ultimately tender study of family in formation — of the distance between wanting to be a parent and being chosen by a child, and the gap between the people we believed we were and the people the act of loving someone reveals us to be. Anchored by a three-handed performance from Jake Lacy (The White Lotus), Nazanin Boniadi (The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power), and newcomer Ruhi Pal, the film won the Panavision Spirit Award for Independent Cinema at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and arrives carrying the kind of festival-tested emotional honesty that distinguishes the year’s most resonant character dramas.