Infested (2023) Shudder by Name, Shudder by Nature (Review)

Shudder is a cool name for a horror streaming platform, but never have I considered the word until the release of their latest Original, 2023’s Infested (A.K.A. Vermines) – the feature debut by French director Sébastien Vaniček. The reason why that train of thought ran through my head was that this is an animal attacks movie, specifically spiders, which means we’ve already hit the point of the review where I announce (as loudly as I possibly can through the written medium) that this is not a movie to test your Arachnophobia against. Infested doesn’t just have a few spiders to contend with, it has all of them, covering the entire spectrum of tiny, normal, bigger than normal, and so big they make the Alien franchises’ Face Hugger look cute and cuddly.

In a cold open, we are subjected to a mere morsel of the arachnoid anarchy to come. In a Middle Eastern desert, some shady men hunt for spiders, and while the first man may be subject to ‘spidery-face-death,’ they eventually capture their charge. Events jump to France, where we find ourselves in a less-than-reputable pawn shop where our hero – and Sneaker wheeler-dealer – Kaleb (Théo Christine), happens upon this very spider for sale. As an avid collector of exotic insects, he buys it along with a necklace for a dear friend’s party later that night. Not having a place to keep his new exotic find, he keeps it in a shoe box, and thanks to water rot, the spider escapes and propagates itself to such a degree that in a matter of hours, numerous residents die, the police quarantine the building, and the entire block of flats falls to the spider menace. Give it a few more hours, and the city would become a republic of Spiders – we are talking about one single creature turning into hundreds upon hundreds, and a ran-down but homely block of flats eventually resembling a dank, inhospitable, infested cave with no means of escape. That the building looks like a giant hive from the outside is just the cherry on the cake.

Before we get to the talking point of Infested as a horror movie, it’s important to stress that it is far more than its creature feature aspirations. For at least the first half an hour, we are talking about a script focused on a community of the working-class and immigrants (who you’ll often find cramped together in less than pristine tower blocks across the Western world), their relationships, history and sense of community. One of the things I love to see in scripts is when the writer (in this case, Vaniček & Florent Bernard) attempts to give the world they create a life beyond the credits. In that, we find more people and relationships than I could ever reference – however, most of these interactions circle the central cast of (the aforementioned) Kaleb, his sister Manon (Lisa Nyarko), estranged friend Jordy (Finnegan Oldfield), and his girlfriend (Sofia Lesaffre) and because of that depth of interaction and history, Infested feels real – at least before the shit hits the fan.

There are numerous references to Kaleb’s drug dealing past among a general sense of the gang world found in movies like Les Miserables (not that one) or La Haine, so naturally police play a crucial role in how events unfold. A police presence appears after the death of the first resident, TN (Ike Zacsongo-Joseph), where they use shaky evidence to establish grounds for a potential viral outbreak, locking everything down into quarantine. And while more productive attempts could’ve been made to introduce the ancillary issues the script concerns itself with, the subtext is as clear as day – the tensions between people from this part of the city and the force are beyond hostile with it reaching a fever-pitched peak after one of the most nail-biting sequences of the year. They could’ve rested on their laurels and just had a virile spider wipe everyone out in a disposable bit of popcorn fun, but they didn’t – they incorporated a social drama with a heavy ACAB subtext, credit where credit is due.  

Of course, you don’t go into a spider movie for social drama, political subtext or even story – you watch it for killer spider action, and on that level, you’ll not be disappointed. After establishing the community, the movie explodes into life-threatening danger – sure, attempts are made to contain the threat, but it’s not long before the building is lost. The depths of hopelessness sink in when Kaleb and his MMA friend, Mathys (Jérôme Niel), try to save a close friend only for numerous spiders to climb out of her dead mouth. The centrepiece of this inter-species conflict happens when they find the one corridor that separates them from certain death (the spider bites kill almost immediately) and freedom. As our survivors negotiate one of the most infested corridors I’ve ever seen with the help of a light that only stays on for a minute, and at the end of the corridor is the inevitability of the police’s actions, where “ACAB” is all I can say. While that is stand out moment, the entire back half consistently delivers creature feature/animal attacks excellence with no lightness of mood, comic relief (ignoring a tree-frog reaction shot, anyway) or hope. Doom runs deep here, as Infested shows the animal kingdom at its most ferocious and shudder-inducing. If these spiders that grow exponentially from generation to generation were real, humans would merely be renting the planet from them. They are a level of animal kingdom horror comparable to the cordyceps of The Last of Us.

Infested is most certainly not for everyone. If the idea of creepy crawlies is enough to send you running for the room to get your partner – you should stay well away, unless you want to suffer waking nightmares at every little thing that moves for the next few days. For those who can stomach the apocalyptic arachnid threat, Vaniček’s incredibly confident, well-shot, staged and acted debut with amazing production design is one of the best from Shudder in a good long while. Sure, it won’t be in the conversation for the best horrors of 2024, but I can say confidently that very few movies or TV shows will have sequences anywhere near as horrifying as those here. It’s in the horrifying and bleak peaks that it becomes perfectly understandable why Vanicek is developing an Evil Dead spin-off.

Rob’s Archive – Infested