Infested Review: Skin-Crawling Spider Horror

Sébastien Vaniček’s Infested breeds Arachnophobia with La Horde as residents of a rundown apartment complex are overrun with deadly spiders.

There’s a strange irony to the fact that Vaniček is making an Evil Dead movie next when he’s shown he’d have been a great fit for the last one. Evil Dead Rise promised Deadites invading an apartment building a la Demons, but it was a pared-down experience for better or worse.

Vaniček builds up an uncomfortable invasion by impossible unholy creatures and delivers a floor-by-floor bloodbath as mutant spiders munch their way through the poor unfortunates holed up inside.

It all starts so innocently. Kaleb likes his exotic animals, and tries to maintain them in the cramped apartment he’s inherited from his deceased mother. To fund both, he is selling high-end sneakers to people in the community but is perhaps a touch too fussy, considering his clientele is as down in the mud as he is.

He ends up buying a strange new spider from a guy he deals with (a spider we see in the movie’s opening as being part of a very deadly bunch). Distracted by the interpersonal dramas of the apartment building residents, he leaves the eight-legged freak in a shoebox temporarily, which it finds a way out of and then breeds at an alarming rate (and takes notes from the Xenomorph’s idea of using human hosts to the extreme). Before long the ratio of spiders to people in the building has tipped very heavily in the favor of arachnid kind, and just a single bite is enough to seal your fate.

So just leave, yeah? Of course, it’s not that simple, as outside forces quarantine the building, not allowing anyone out, which means survival is left on a knife edge as Kaleb and his friends and neighbors try to force their way out of a den of killer spiders.

Oh, and the spiders can grow to very large sizes too. So not only are there swarms of small skittering nightmares, but dog-sized monstrosities as well—a smart move to curtail a lot of the early solutions to the problem.

Infested tries to maintain a tricky balance of commentary and horror that is largely helped by the fact Vaniček frontloads the film with character work, establishing the past and present tensions and woes of the residents. Kaleb (played by Théo Christine) is an intriguingly flawed protagonist, befitting the circumstances. He’s an oddball by the standards of others around him, but he means well, and he gets moments to show his kindness. he’s clearly suffering from grief that is maintained by his stubborn determination not to leave the apartment he grew up in, and his care for the freaks of the pet world is where he finds a connection. Unfortunately, his self-destructive streak, mild as it might be in relative terms, ends up causing this horrific situation, and Christine’s passionate performance sells the conflicted nature of the character.

There’s little time for narrative growth beyond the literal kind the spiders have, and the deeper the film gets, the harder it is to stay connected with stories outside the immediate. The political implications of the lockdown on a building occupied by those on the fringes of French society needed a bit more meat to it as by the time we really get into the thick of it, there’s too much else going on for it really factor as effectively as it could.

It’s not that Infested does it poorly either; it’s just too light at the wrong moments, which makes it feel clunkier in others. It’s just about walking the tonal line between drama and B-movie madness, but mostly on the strength of the premise.

The other characters suffer from the same problem because much of this is (rightly) centered on Kaleb and the runtime doesn’t quite allow for anyone else to get much time beyond battling the spiders, which is obviously the core reason anyone’s watching the movie to begin with. It

And those spiders are very much worth the price of admission. There are moments in Infested that will ruin any arachnophobia sufferer’s day were they to witness them, and it may well trigger that fear in those who never had it. The sheer unrelenting force of the spiders is on show and every reasonable and irrational fear of them is made manifest in Infested. Big spiders,swarms out of nowhere, and body horror nastiness that pays off.

Infested is at its best when tapping into that. In a horribly intense sequence, the remaining survivors must get through a corridor with a timed light switch at one end. It just so happens to be filled with arachnids of all sizes. Light keeps them at bay, but someone has to man the switch so people can get to the other end of the corridor, but that, of course, means someone needs to go last.

It’s the best combination of skin-crawling tension and skittering chaos in the whole film. Later attempts struggle to replicate the masterful horror of that scene, and while the use of CG is fairly good overall, a moment later in the movie, there are swarms of spiders on the ceiling that look like stretched projections rather than monster creepy crawlies. It actually took me out of the momentum the film had been building, and diluted the clever use of CG to that point.

The important thing is that for just over 100 minutes, Infested does its number one job and gets under your skin. It fumbles the ending a bit because it strays from its best ideas, but there’s enough uncomfortable creepy crawly horror preceding it to make for an enthralling creature feature.

SCORE:7/10

ComingSoon’s review policy defines a 7 as “Good. A successful piece of entertainment that is worth checking out, but it may not appeal to everyone.”

An Infested review screener was provided for review.

Infested is out on Shudder on April 26, 2024.