Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Sébastien Vaniček
Starring: Théo Christine, Finnegan Oldfield, Jérôme Niel, Sofia Lesaffre, Lisa
Nyarko
Spring is generally the time of year when you start to find spiders
lurking around your home, and Spring 2024 has brought a mini arachnid
infestation to our screens. Along with the Australian production
Sting, French creature feature Infested is the second of a
pair of spider themed movies to arrive as the days grow longer.
Both films have roughly the same premise, that of a naïve young person
inviting a mysterious spider into their apartment, only for it to grow
to a massive size and terrorise the residents of their building.
In this case the building is one of those brutalist social housing
tower blocks that dominate the skylines of working class French suburbs.
Like a Gallic Del Boy, twentysomething Kaleb (Theo Christine) has
a lockup in the building's basement filled with dodgy goods which he and
his friend Mathys (Jerome Niel) flog to the locals. Kaleb's
bedroom has been turned into a minor natatorium, filled with exotic
creatures. The latest addition to his collection is a spider he acquires
from the backroom of a local pawn shop. Kaleb believes the creature to
be harmless but the audience knows better, as we were made privy to its
deadly ways in a middle eastern set prologue that detailed its
capture.
Of course, the spider escapes from Kaleb's bedroom and not only does it
start growing, but it gives birth to many other spiders, which in turn
multiply until the building is…well, the title says it all.
Like Sting, Infested invests quite a bit of time in establishing
its characters, but in this case they're quite clichéd and often veer
into uncomfortable racial stereotypes. Kaleb has an estranged
relationship with his sister Manon (Lisa Nyarko), who wants to
sell the apartment they inherited from their mother. The mixed race
Kaleb pines for his white mother, but there's oddly never any mention of
his presumably black father. Most of the black male characters are
portrayed as criminals or meatheads solely interested in acquiring a new
pair of sneakers. The building's janitor is an elderly Chinese woman (Xing Xing Cheng) whose only defining feature is that she scowls a lot in a modern riff
on the old offensive dragon lady trope.
This sort of stuff jars with the film's superficially progressive
message about the treatment of minorities in France, and with how it
cheaply turns the police into one-note villains in the climax. Much of
the characterisation is overly reliant on characters crudely detailing
their backstories and interpersonal relationships in brief monologues in
between spider attacks. Writer/director
Sebastian Vanicek struggles to build character through action in
the manner of the best survival thrillers and monster movies.
Thankfully Vanicek's unconvincing writing is balanced with some very
convincing set-piece staging. He's been snapped up to direct the next
instalment of the Evil Dead franchise, and it's easy to
see why. Once the spiders get loose there are some sequences that are so
effective you'll be checking your bedsheets for eight-legged intruders
before you can sleep soundly. Vanicek creates some great "Get the hell
out of there!" moments as spiders emerge in the background of shots,
unseen by oblivious characters in the foreground. A sequence in which
the protagonists are forced to slowly walk through a corridor filled
with spiders of all sizes is the stuff of nightmares, as is an
adrenaline fuelled chase up several flights of stairs.
At a certain point however the film begins to contradict the rules it's
established regarding its arachnid antagonists, and I'm still confused
about a couple of details in the manic climax. A few well-executed scare
sequences and the convincing creepy crawly FX are just enough to make
this a recommend for animal attacks devotees. But the lack of onscreen
kills, clichéd characterisation and inconsistent storytelling greatly
detract from what could have been an all-time classic of the nature run
amok sub-genre.
Infested is on Shudder from
April 26th.
