Infested (2023)

• Year: 2023
• Released: 26 Apr 2024
• Country: France, United States
• Adwords: 3 wins & 6 nominations
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26744289/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/infested
• Metacritics:
• Available in: 720p, 1080p, 1080p
• Language: French
• MPA Rating: N/A
• Genre: Horror
• Runtime: 106 min
• Writer: Florent Bernard, Sébastien Vanicek
• Director: Sébastien Vanicek
• Cast: Théo Christine, Sofia Lesaffre, Jérôme Niel
• Keywords:

	6.7/10
	18% – Critics
	false% – Audience

Infested Storyline

Kaleb, who’s about to turn 30 and has never been lonelier. He’s fighting with his sister over a matter of inheritance and has cut ties with his best friend. Passionate about exotic animals, he comes home one day with a venomous spider and accidentally let it slip away.

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Infested Movie Reviews

In Defense of Arson

What tangled webs they weave when the survivors cannot leave.

Infested is the latest of European Apartment/Isolation Horror with the likes of 2007’s Rec from Spain and 2022’s Lockdown Tower with the latter closer to this kind of rundown building and both from France. While I liked the other two more, this still works. At least the first half, anyways.

A neglected apartment tower’s resident critter expert brings home a poisonous spider only to lose it almost immediately and just as swiftly, that thing multiplies tenfold+. Soon, all the residents will face off with the new eight-legged occupants and hopefully some will survive.

As usual in these When-Animals-Attack films, the characters do some DUMB things. Like over and over.

Wasn’t there a first-floor window to crawl out of? Front door to simply open? Egad, every dumb mistake you could make happened here. Granted, I’d probably panic, too or simply have a heart-attack with my arachnophobia in a dark building full of spiders.

My biggest issue was there were no time jumps to make this even remotely realistic. And to me, the more realistic, the more terrifying it is. Here, the one spider lays its egg sack and pretty much, within minutes the whole tower is covered with them. Plus, they grow to almost human size with each new batch.

Now that said, it didn’t stop me from jumping so many times out of my seat and audibly swearing, I had to constantly pause the movie to recover. So, yeah, they did their job on my fears. And if you also suffer from the same fright of these abominations, you’ll probably get some great scares out of this as well.

You’ll just have to get through some tough/long scenes of character set up in the first half-hour. Despite these feeling like real people who really live in the same tight quarters, it was almost brutal to get through so much exposition to get to what we pressed play for: a Spider Invasion.

It’s not bad, and for the grand majority of the spider-scenes, they did look like real spiders (well, except for the 3-foot kinds.) Just try not to imagine them on your own skin.

***

Final Thoughts: It pains me to give this a mediocre review. I did the same for 2022’s Fall – which explored my greatest fear: Heights. (Spiders are my #2.) That one just suffered through cliches and really bad characters I didn’t care about. This film’s problem was the speed they multiplied and size they grew. Also, since when are spiders social bloodsuckers?

A rather fun creature feature when it focuses on that

Looking for a special present, a man decides to help get over his lot in life by caring for an exotic spider to go along with the rest of the animals in his collection, but when it becomes apparent that the spider has escaped and begun reproducing more voracious creatures like it must get away alive.

This was a disappointing and somewhat underwhelming genre effort. The main part that works for this one is the highly intriguing and at times outright terrifying work of the spider being let loose in the community. With a fantastic opening giving the kind of stellar example of the ferocity and deadliness of the species, there’s quite a lot to like with the gradual reveal of something loose in the building as their lives are interrupted by the discovery of dead residents, strange animal attacks, or the presence of strange webs found all over the building. The series of scenes here involving the swarm of ravenous creatures appearing out of the cracks of the building and attacking in basements, kitchens, bathrooms, or just about anywhere else throughout here while also given enough storyline context about surviving past the extermination techniques due to their rapidly-procreation style or invulnerability to any tactics employed against them. With the stellar pace present that keeps them far more intent in the second half so these terrifying scenes can come about at a frantic clip, these are what manage to provide its best moments. What holds it back is, unfortunately, everything else that transpires here. Most of that is the extremely sluggish and generally uninteresting first half that spends far too much time on the residents of the apartment and the go-nowhere lives they lead. Featuring a highly original series of urban stereotypes involving drug pushers, counterfeiters, sexual miscreants, or other forms of deviance that takes place in this kind of hoodlum environment, these all create a simple enough setup that provides all the necessary build-up to get to know the group but it’s all cliches and uninteresting as a result. Very little of this makes the group stand out from any other community of down-on-their-luck individuals in a low-rent squalor and fearing for their lives due to the company they keep, stuck in a situation that only gets worse with the inclusion of the spiders here. That causes this to be a rather sluggish affair without offering any kind of genre work or interest during this point so it takes far longer than it needs to get to the spider action and thus the running time is inordinately longer than it needs to be, bringing this down overall.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Violence.

“Vermines” is a very good film that manages to give a message with social criticism.

“Vermines” is a more complex film than it seems at first glance, the script touches on topics such as gentrification in a French building inhabited by people of African and Arab descent. This type of racism and discrimination is constantly seen in the film and as social criticism it is added to spiders as an example of the animal kingdom that is affected by urbanization, thus emphasizing gentrification as a central theme. Within the horror and thriller genres, the film achieves interesting and distressing scenes. The main characters are endearing and you care about them. The cinematography achieves a great atmosphere along with the filming locations and the camera movements manage to accentuate the action captured on the screen. The cast is top-notch, each actor imbues their characters with their own style. The director does an elegant job, he knows perfectly well what he wants to tell and how to do it. “Vermines” is a very good film that manages to give a message with social criticism.