‘Infested’ Review: Sébastien Vaniček’s Creature Feature Undervalues Its Human Characters

For movies about killer spiders, the things that are generally of primary concern are the size and the volume of the spiders. With that in mind, connoisseurs of this horror subgenre should be pleased to find that Sébastien Vaniček’s feature-length debut, Infested, delivers on both of those fronts. While the spiders here, a highly poisonous and aggressive desert species, may initially emerge at a deceptively normal size, they gradually balloon to larger proportions as they overwhelm an apartment block in a French banlieue. They’re also a rapidly reproducing breed, to the point where their offspring and their offspring’s offspring are eventually scampering all over the building’s walls, ceilings, air ducts, and residents.

In expected creature-feature form, Infested is quick to explain how these deadly arachnids made their journey to an unfamiliar urban environment. Following a frenzied opening in a patch of Middle Eastern desert where three men find and capture some specimens to sell on the black market (not all of them make it out alive), one of the spiders ends up in a Parisian pawn shop where it’s purchased by Kaleb (Théo Christine), a rare bug collector who has an impressive insectarium set up in the apartment he shares with his sister, Manon (Lisa Nyarko). Disregarding the shop owner’s blasé warnings that it might be poisonous, Kaleb brings it home and temporarily (and rather carelessly) places it in a shoebox before he can build the critter a proper home. Unsurprisingly, the spider escapes almost as soon as Kaleb leaves the room.

From here, Infested proceeds in fairly conventional fashion through many drawn-out sequences of characters wandering around their environs while spiders creep around just out of sight. Once the first victim’s body is found, police arrive on the scene and, initially unaware of the cause of death, quarantine and lock down the building to prevent a potential disease outbreak.

As Kaleb and his ragtag group of friends desperately try and find a way out of the building, Infected becomes akin to a Halloween funhouse, with endless rooms, hallways, and staircases teeming with creepy crawlies. Vanicek shoots these sequences with an immediacy that induces us to tense up alongside the characters, especially as the spiders display a knack for suddenly flying up at their faces at will. At the same time, the film’s unvaried approach ultimately becomes a little tedious even at a relatively leisurely 106 minutes.

There’s an obvious allegory to go alongside Infested’s B-movie carnage, which is of a piece with the race and class tensions found in recent banlieue-set scorchers like Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables and Romain Gavras’s Athena. The film’s script, by Vanicek and Florent Bernard, ultimately aims to position the spiders and the immigrant-heavy population of the building as one and the same, outsiders who are ignored, feared, even despised by the rest of society.

This becomes especially clear once our main characters, after trying to escape the building through the basement level out of which Kaleb runs his illegal sneaker-selling business, chillingly discover that the police have locked the exit. But working against the film’s aspirations toward a sense of social realism is that the marginalized characters are little more than stock types with routine backstories and interpersonal squabbles. If Infested had given us a little more reason to invest in its human specimens than in the blunt mechanics of its genre trappings, then maybe some of the commentary would have clung to us like the webs do to the spiders’ victims.