I may just be speaking for myself here, but one thing that managed to cure me from being a quivering arachophobe is the fact that my significant other is one hundred times more terrified of them than I ever were, and so whenever one of those eight legged freaks manages to suddenly appear in the corner of the ceiling or on the bathroom tile, I have to be the one to fire the little fuckers out the nearest open window. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t get the odd shiver of revulsion whenever I have to creep into their orbit armed with a glass and a bit of card.
The good news is, the tenuous balance of my irrational fears means that not only am I cool watching oversized spiders attack people on film, but it has an already built-in “ick” factor that always means I’m going to get my money’s worth.
It’s with this in mind that we approach the first of possibly three major killer spider releases that are crawling out way in 2024 and the good news is that Infested (original French title Vermines) has got the legs – all eight of them to be exact – to be the best of the bunch.
After some early scenes that see a bunch of men scooping up spiders in the African dessert and placing them in flimsy, plastic containers in order to send overseas to sell as exotic pets. However, we know that this is a insanely bad idea when one of the bug hunters gets bitten and his death throes are so painfully violent, one of his buddies has to put him out of his misery with a machete.
From there we meet Kaleb, a young French man who is going through some hard times in life after losing his mother not so long ago and is currently butting heads with his sister, Manon, who wants to renovate the flat in order to sell it and move on. Desperate to make it big by selling trainers with his dim-witted business partner, Mathis, from his lock up, Kaleb nevertheless is fairly lonely, having become estranged from his childhood friend, Jordy, and finds solace in his large collection of exotic pets which includes frogs, millipedes and – you guessed it – one recently bought spider from dubious sources.
Keeping the arachnid in a shoe box until he can get a proper tank whipped up, Kaleb heads out to attend a function in the crumbling block of flats where he and Manon live, but unbeknownst to him, this particular breed of creepy crawly is a little more proactive than most and rapidly chews its way out.
From there, the spider gets to work, disappearing into the nooks and crannies of the vast building and dropping young like nobodies business that start growing at a worrying rate and it does so right under the noses of all the hapless residents who don’t realise the venormous danger until it’s too late.
Can Kaleb, Manon, Mathis, a visiting Jordy and his girlfriend, Lila, escape this chilling infestation before the authorities lock the building down for good?
I went into Infested with higher hopes than your average bug picture simply because its director, Sébastien Vaniček, had been selected to helm the next Evil Dead movie and after watching this tight, French arach-attack it’s fairly easy to see why. Best described as Arachnophobia meets Evil Dead Rise (with a little hint of Joe Cornish’s Attack The Block webbed in for good measure), the movie has a similar setup to Lee Cronin’s Deadite sequel that sees its likable but flawed protagonists living in a dilapidated living space that becomes the perfect breeding ground for an unstoppable wave of chittering death.
Vaniček obviously knows his stuff as his wind up to the pitch is nicely played. Not only does he provide us with a clutch of humans who are refreshingly three dimentional, but who have hang ups and actual issues that make you really not want them to be on the business end of a pair of fangs. It makes a nice change, because usually in killer animal movies, the casts are fundamentally so unlikable, you don’t give a crap about who dies and who lives, but here you’re firmly invested in Kaleb’s desperate acts to remain part of the ramshackle community that make up his life. It’s also nice to see an urban youth portrayed with such a big heart too as Theo Christine (last seen whizzing around in Gran Turismo) gives us a character who may skirt the law somewhat due to his get rich quick schemes, but who is also deeply vunerable and wounded under his brash exterior. The movie also seeks to make the supporting cast far more likable than just your average victims and Jérôme Niel’s ditzy, bike stealing sidekick is an enjoyable example of the film’s better than average character work.
Also enjoying some exemplary detail is the surroundings and the director takes great pains to foreshadow how much this creaky old building is going to favour the spider menace far more than the plump, juicy humans as we’re organically clued into all the failing lights and dark crevices that will undoubtedly later have us yelling panicked warnings at the screen. Not only does it give us a veneer of social commentary (as always in French horror, the police don’t come off particularly well either, with their attempts to contain the infestation veering into fascism), but it results in some cracking set pieces that are as taunt as a web strand. A sequence that sees the survivors have to negotiate a corridor teeming with the spindly, toxic, arachno-bastards is rendered all the more horrific when you realise the light is on an energy-saving sixty second timer and thus reaches Scream-levels of anxiety.
Of course, none of this would work if Vaniček didn’t know the optimum way to present his freakish little antagonists; but the fledgling director proves his mettle superbly. Wisely taking the Arachnophobia route, the film keeps the spiders relatively small (ish – although some of their number alarmingly do grow to ten times their normal size) and the scares also benefit from using a type of sand spider – mostly real, disturbingly – instrad of the usual house spider or tarantula, that absolutely love to hurl their hairy bodies directly into their victims faces.
If you can’t bear the thought of sitting through a spider movie, then this film will most likely give you an eight-legged conniption thanks to the motherload of skin crawling moments it serves up – I was subconsciously scratching and fidgeting the whole way through, myself – but if you can handle the influx of nightmarish moments you’re required to process, you’ll certainly be invested in Infested.
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