NOSEEUMS (2025)

Advance Review! Premiering at London’s Frightfest 2025 from Torchlight Studios and Odin’s Eye Entertainment!
Directed by Raven Carter.
Written by Raven Carter, Jason-Michael Anthony, Hendreck Joseph.
No trailer for this one yet.

Ember (Aleigha Burt) is a promising young anthropology student who recently broke up with her boyfriend. In order to forget about her ex, she goes on a girl’s getaway weekend at a lake house. But the nightmarish history surrounding the house seems to have a special connection to Ember and her own foggy past.

NOSEEUMS is steeped in metaphor. Sometimes this metaphor is veiled, other times not so much. The film feels like it has a whole lot of things to say about race, culture, and America’s not so great history. You see, Ember is a young black woman struggling with fitting into the modern world. At the beginning of the film, Ember has a short debate with her teacher involving privilege, opportunity, and systematic obstacles. Of course, it’s Craven 101 that if something is talked about in a classroom, that means it’s going to be one of the main themes of the movie. This is compounded with the fact that Ember was dating a white dude and has found herself friends with his friend-set—a pair of white gals and an Asian gal, as besties. Ember’s black friend dislikes it that Ember is going on this girl’s weekend with her white friends, once again highlighting that Ember’s conflicted racial issues. As a story that examines these complex feelings about race, NOSEEUMS is surprisingly ripe with thematic heft. Even the title, NOSEEUMS, can be seen as a metaphor for the inner conflict, the small prejudices, and outright racism that Emma deals with on a daily basis, yet chooses not to deal with them as she feels they are inconsequential, like small bugs buzzing around. That’s good and deep stuff and even as a white dude, I found myself compelled by this conflict and concerned for Ember as a character.

Aleigha Burt is solid as Ember. She has an annoying habit of biting her lip and does it in pretty much every scene. While it may convey awkwardness, self-consciousness, and may even be cute at times, it’s distracting when she does it every time she’s on screen. And she’s on screen a lot. Burt is a good actress, conveying a lot of difficult emotions, though once I noticed this tendency, it couldn’t un-notice it.

The major problem is, and this is often a problem with movies with this heavy a social message, is that the message outweighs the horror. And that definitely is the case with NOSEEUMS. It’s as if the filmmaker and her co-writers were so distracted with communicating this interesting issues Ember has to face, that they forgot to make it all consistently scary. Director/Co-writer Raven Carter does pepper in a few scenes that are legitimately stylized and sometimes palpably frightening. Specifically, some of the nightmare flashback sequences of real racial violence. But these are few and far between.

Additionally, NOSEEUMS wraps up on a strange note, with a light-hearted ending that not only undercuts the horror and drama that just occurred but honestly should leave a bad taste in the mouths of most. Still, had the horror been as prevalent as the message, I think I would have liked NOSEEUMS more.