INFESTED - Mark Reviews Movies

Infested, Shudder

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | April 25, 2024

Which is scarier: one big monster or hundreds of smaller ones? Basic math gives us a solid rationale for a correct answer, and Infested, in which countless venomous spiders take over an apartment complex, provides a more subjective form of evidence. This is an unsettling thriller that sets out to do one thing—to make our skin crawl—and accomplishes it over and over again.

That's probably all one needs to hear in order to look for or actively avoid this film, depending on one's tolerance for depictions of creepy-crawlies invading spaces that look a little too close to home. Co-writer/director Sébastien Vanicek, making his feature debut, knows that the familiarity of the story's setting is key to this material's success. Spiders crawl into and out of ventilation grates. They reproduce and form a swarm inside a shoebox. One actually gets inside someone's shoe, without the poor guy knowing it until he feels something sharp pinch the sole of his foot.

One can imagine the wicked smile on the director's face behind the camera as these scenes were being staged, because there is a demented sort of glee to watching these spiders move without anyone noticing or realizing that one—or a dozen or couple dozen of them—is much closer to someone than they could have known. What makes them even more frightening, perhaps, is that Vanicek and co-screenwriter Florent Bernard haven't made these arachnids into vicious, murderous monsters. They behave like any ordinary spiders, minding their own business unless someone or something gives them an excuse to move and, if necessary, defend themselves.

It just becomes increasingly more difficult for the human characters to avoid disturbing the eight-legged things as more and more of them take up more and more space in this apartment building. That's just pretty basic math, too.

The film opens somewhere in some desert, with a group of hunters apparently looking for these spiders to capture and sell on the black market. It doesn't make much sense, of course, unless this group is part of some elaborately nefarious plot for these spiders to take over the world, but it also doesn't matter.

Under a rock, one guy finds a hole where the spiders are nesting, floods it with some kind of gas, and doesn't have much time to be shocked when one of the arachnids leaps at his face. While he scrambles to knock it off his body and remove any clothing the spider might have crawled inside, his associates start collecting the rest of the swarm in plastic containers. The last thing they do, as the discoverer howls in pain from the venomous bite, is take a machete to their agonized cohort. That tells us everything we need to know about the results of a bite and the notion that there could be some antivenom. They're fatal, and nope, there almost certainly isn't one.

The rest of the story is contained to a neat-looking but dilapidated apartment building in a French city. Kaleb (Théo Christine), a resident there, has had a lifelong obsession with little creatures, and his bedroom is filled with terrariums containing lizards, frogs, insects, a scorpion, and other such animals. While looking for a farewell gift for a neighbor in the backroom of a local shop, he spots one of those spiders and buys it along with the present. The shoebox he puts his new find in isn't nearly strong enough a habitat to hold it.

There's some human drama, most of it having to do with Kaleb's taut relationships with his sister Manon (Lisa Nyarko), a municipal cop who keeps shutting off the heat lamps of her brother's menagerie to save on the electric bill, and his former best friend Jordy (Finnegan Oldfield), who shows up with his sister Lila (Sofia Lesaffre) and her boyfriend Mathys (Jérôme Niel) to help Manon with some things around the apartment. The two young men were close as kids, dreaming of opening a zoo for reptiles and insects, until something happened that drove them apart. Kaleb hasn't gotten over it or, for that matter, the death of his and Manon's mother some years ago.

As far as the necessary human element in a creature feature goes, this will do. What's more important, perhaps, is how Vanicek uses the scenes of Kaleb going about his business throughout the building to establish likely or inevitable victims, the layout of the apartment complex and its specific spaces, and the little quirks of the worn-down building that will play into the suspense later. One staircase, for example, has an unreliable motion-sensing light, and a hallway has lights set to a timer that only functions on one side of the crossing. It's not a long hall, although distance is a subjective matter when the hall is later filled with webbing, as well as occupants that evade the light and only move in the dark.

Just as the spiders increase exponentially in number, Vanicek builds up to more complicated setpieces, such as the one in the hall with the timed light or a standoff with cops who are keeping the building on lockdown. It only becomes too over-the-top during that climax, but until then, Infested relies on the little but undeniable fright of finding a spider in an unexpected place, the disturbing sight of hundreds of an arachnid's offspring dismounting from its parent, and one unseen spider and then many more emerging from an opening into someone's personal space. It's so ordinary, and that's why the film is so creepily skin-tingling.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products