Infested is now streaming on Shudder. This review is based on a screening at the Overlook Film Festival.
It’s not difficult to make spiders scary. Many people are frightened of them anyway, even when they’re normal sized and not reproducing at an apocalyptic pace. In this way, the new French film Infested is playing the horror-movie game on easy mode: All it needs are a few hairy legs and a cluster of creepy-crawlies skittering across the edge of the frame. A respectable chunk of the audience will squirm in their seats, regardless of whatever else the movie has (or doesn’t have) going on. First-time feature director Sébastien Vanicek delivers enough of these shivery kicks to make Infested worthwhile, if not necessarily a new classic of the genre. At different points, it evokes such fun analogues as Gremlins – the arachnid that sparks this whole ordeal is purchased in the back room of a store that’s not unlike Mr. Wing’s antique shop – and the 2011 John Boyega vehicle Attack the Block.
The latter comparison is rooted in the film’s setting: Most of Infested unfolds inside of a massive housing complex somewhere in suburban Paris, which becomes a war zone once the authorities learn about the spider-based mayhem that’s unfolding within its walls. They know more than the residents about what’s going on, which means that they know more than the audience as well – an approach that actually does a lot to ramp up the film’s sense of paranoid tension. That’s because the story is told from the perspective of Kaleb (Théo Christine), a ne’er-do-well in his late twenties living in his deceased mom’s old apartment with few prospects besides an informal hustle selling fenced Nikes to his neighbors.
Kaleb is, conveniently, also an exotic animal enthusiast, with a menagerie of heated aquariums in his bedroom and a dream of someday opening his own reptile park. That’s why he purchases an unknown, but probably illegal species of exotic spider in a plastic takeout container from a shady guy with a store full of stolen goods. It’s not too hard to guess where this is all headed: Kaleb transfers Spider to shoebox, shoebox has an unnoticed hole in it, spider escapes and kicks off a rampage of toxic bites and eggs laid in pus-filled torsos. All clear and fair enough.
But Infested also spends a frustrating amount of time developing the relationships between Kaleb; his sister, Manon (Lisa Nyarko); her best friend, Lila (Sofia Lesaffre); and Lila’s boyfriend (who also happens to be Kaleb’s estranged childhood best friend), Jordy (Finnegan Oldfield). The frustrating part is that the only reason we’re learning all of this is to give some poignancy to these characters’ eventual peril and probable deaths, which makes the mind wander back to spiders, which leads to wondering why we’re watching these people argue with one another when they could be covered in spiders already. (There’s also social commentary at play – low-income housing occupied by people of color, institutional indifference, etc. – but thankfully it’s not too heavily underlined.)
To be fair, this was not a big-budget production, which means that there’s only so much spider action Vanicek and crew can put onto the screen. A sequence late in the film where arachnids attack the surviving characters en masse uses flash and noise to both enhance and distract from the minimal effects. It’s a smart strategy, and one the movie uses frequently: There’s a lot of chaos and yelling every time the characters are corralled into a space with or without poisonous super-spiders. That keeps the viewer’s cortisol spiking, but can get tiresome after a while. Because let’s face it: We’re here for the spiders, baby! The creature-feature elements of Infested are all executed with panache and a great sense of tension, employing both CGI and practical effects to riff on such classics as the mirror scare and the shot where something – in this case, a whole shitload of spiders – is crawling across the ceiling above an oblivious character’s head.
The creature-feature elements of Infested are executed with panache and a great sense of tension.
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The body horror, while limited to a handful of scenes, is appropriately gruesome and covered in nasty, gooey pustules. The art department gets an impressive amount of mileage out of Halloween-store cobwebs, and dizzying 360-degree camera rotations do the rest of the destabilizing work. The result is the kind of film where a viewer feels compelled to shake out their pant leg afterwards to make sure there aren’t any critters hiding in there, which, on an elemental level, makes Infested a success – even if it is taking an eight-legged shortcut to chills.
