Spiders. Of ALL the creatures to terrorize the people, these are the preferred ones? Those of us who let out a gasp at the sight of a spider can come to testify that many legged arachnids are an easy source of horror. Most of us don’t really appreciate being greeted by these visitors on our windows, pinching our walls, or building thread-y lodgers in dusty corners. They are our enemies as any invasive pest would be as much as they are encore and endangered shutting the door to all the other crawly pests. In Sébastien Vanicek’s nightmarish feature debut “Infested,” one can expect as many spiders as you wish and even spiders of exceptional size adorned with the delicate art of spinning webs who collectively contribute to a breathtaking monster movie that is bound to make many people leap, fidget and in some cases, shriek.
In Vanicek’s Infested film, a young man named Kaleb (Théo Christine) collects and keeps many creatures and bugs in his room which annoys his sister, Manon (Lisa Nyarko). She spends her time redecorating their old flat, selling it after their mother has passed away while Kaleb’s prospects are still more or less vague and even though a lot of people in his orbit think the worst of a young man dressed in a hoodie who sells expensive Nike shoes on the side, he attempts to face it and do the right thing by his neighbors. It goes without saying through his heinous act of keeping exotic pets like a snakehead next to his bed adds trouble in the apartment when an escaped mutant spider begins to kill and lay hundreds of eggs around the building and only Kaleb, Manon, Mathys (Jérôme Niel), Jordy (Finnegan Oldfield) and Lila (Sofia Lesaffre) remain to fight for their lives.
This inordinate frightfulness towards a spider has been sequenced into its independent transforming fear horror sub-genre. Be it the 1955 edition of giant bug horror classic “Tarantula”, dare you look at small town infestation spider species in great remains of suspense such as “Kingdom of the Spiders” and “Arachnophobia”, the cheeky spider divas of early 2000, “Eight Legged Freaks”, to the punto y sigue congelate “Yeti” which oswell of kaiju sized legs from unclothed spiders burst fun praticando.
Similar to the preceding titles, “Infestation” illicitly uses the fear, whether understandable or unreasonable, concerning snakebite alternates, spider bouquet relocating and building their webs over one’s shelter, speeding up of spider behavior until she becomes a threat, and the randomness of their action as any child asked to kill a spider would attest.
There is something so much greater than that though in “Infested”. The Spider infestation in that film is not only poisonous spiders of abnormal size to make one shiver. It is that they are about to pounce on you and/or viciously savage soundly the insatiable beast over the screens, every time you are able to edge the screen blood thirsty unnatural killing machines. They will dwell inside a host’s body and then out from their poor victim’s skin. Others are ensnared in them within the webs or invaded in their very domiciles. Nowhere is free from infestation and once it begins with a capitalist block of flats inhabited by Kaleb, it’s sealed off by the police’s willpower locking in kith and kin with machines of death. Beyond the premises of old monster spider films, Vanicek also brings in the group interference movie “Attack the Block” where friends work together against invading extraterrestrials and the claustrophobic apartment horror “Shivers” by David Cronenberg, in which a parasite causes mayhem in a luxury apartment building.
how important this consideration is today co-scenarist of “Attack the Block” with Florent Bernard Vanicek borrows to some degree more modern context to this well-framed but one dimensional jump scare.
As the eight-legged brawl is about to commence, Kaleb’s village is highlighted– the different neighbors from the friendly old-timers who remember his mother with warmth to the paranoid grouch hurling accusations of drug peddling in a violent manner and the not so pleasant relations he has to the people he is suppose to be closest to. Later, we find that the cops and the local government have mostly done a disappearing act with the neighborhood because it’s a poorer neighborhood, so a bit of social criticism peeks into the story. Once the spider dam bursts, it sent me back to the early days of COVID isolation when everyone was confined to their apartments and in some cases every person for himself. This phase does not last long, as the spiders are multiplying and growing with the speed of mutants and the danger increases with every new propulsive track Vanicek secretary adds to the film.
It had to be spiders, of course. The little creatures are everywhere and nowhere we want to find them. They demonstrate how rapidly we can go into a panic mode, how we can react to the presence of spiders (with violence, crying, etc.), and how we help those who are also in a state of panic with the presence of spiders.
Amidst all the skin-crawling, gasp-inducing moments in ‘Infested’, this film at least manages to deliver the adrenaline jungle of a well-crafted horror pic. Maybe you do challenge yourself to see this horror movie about something nasty, accumulate a suspense in core about the coming of the evil heroic spiders impregnating down the screen and ending up glee with outlasting that thrill. Vanicek’s first feature film is equally impressive taking hold of the viewer with quick terror and transforming a gloomy jednoduchych chimneys into cavities of spider webs dark shadows and dead ends. It was as satisfying as it was to go out of ‘Infested’, it did nothing to reduce my apprehension of its eight-legged straw cabal.
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