Horror movies usually tend to fixate on fears to engage their audience or do something truly horrifying and disturbing. The latter are typically easier to digest since they’re easier to shake off as they’re not exploiting something the audience may already be afraid of. For example, IT (1990; 2017) has an easy way to terrify its audience because people are afraid of clowns and so forth. But horror movies that focus on killers or the alike have to be more creative as they don’t have a predestined fear to exploit to terrify their viewers. With all of this being said, prior to watching Sébastien Vaniček’s newest, Infested, I was not someone who would call themselves arachnophobic, but now there is certainly an argument to be made. Infested burrows its way into your skin and mind and refuses to leave the nest it leaves inside as it continues to torment and haunt its audience for hours and days after the credits roll, making the audience that much more squeamish and heightening their fear of spiders that much more.
A still from Sebastien Vanicek’s INFESTED. Photo courtesy of Shudder/IFC Films.
Infested mainly focuses on Kaleb (Théo Christine), whose livelihood involves selling a variety of things to friends and acquaintances he has made throughout the years. Whether the products be shoes, jewelry, movies, whatever it is, Kaleb most likely has it. The person he typically purchases from got tired of Kaleb supposedly buying it for cheap and flipping it to other people for profit, but it doesn’t prevent him from selling Kaleb living creatures now. This is how Kaleb ends up getting the first spider, a spider unlike any spider that has been seen by the masses before. This spider is resilient and refuses to die. If you were to try and kill it, instead of dying, it reproduces exponentially and truly becomes a nightmare to deal with as it overtakes everyone around it and makes everything its own web.
A still from Sebastien Vanicek’s INFESTED. Photo courtesy of Shudder/IFC Films.
When Kaleb puts his entire building under spider dealings, he works with Lila (Sofia Lesaffre) and Manon (Lisa Nyarko) and a few others to try and save themselves from essentially becoming spider food. What ends up happening is a rather disturbing game of spider and fly (because cat and mouse simply doesn’t work here) and the chaos and fears truly make themselves present and continue to lurk in the film, truly infesting itself into the audience’s brains.
What makes Infested the terrifying, phobia-delivering, nightmare fuel it successfully becomes are the brilliant direction from first-time feature length filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček (Mayday) and the script he co-wrote with Florent Bernard (Jack Mimoun & the Secrets of Val Verde) capturing the audience from start to finish. Not only is the movie nearly perfectly shot, but the confined space that the majority of the film takes place in and the presentation of the spiders are truly haunting. These aren’t your generic spiders and they aren’t mutated Eight Legged Freaks spiders, either, but their sheer size (something that seems like they came from Australia) and ability to reproduce at the rate they do is enough to send any audience member into a nightmare hellscape filled with a new fear that cannot get shaken off, making them want to rip off their skin and crawl into a purifying soak.
L-R: Théo Christine as Kaleb and Jérôme Niel as Mathys in Sebastien Vanicek’s INFESTED. Photo courtesy of Shudder/IFC Films.
However, as terrifying and traumatizing as Infested is, thanks to the critters it focuses on, it would all land absolutely flat if the cast didn’t exemplify fear to be the monster we all know it can be. Kaleb realizing not only has he put his own life in jeopardy, but those of everyone he cares about, too, and those of the people who live around him, all due to him wanting to make a quick buck. He quickly goes from a kind of slimy entrepreneur to the guy who knows he just messed up and wants to survive and make right. It’s a character trait we’ve seen time and time again but Théo Christine (Gran Turismo)’s ability to hone this and bring to life this world for the audience, paired with the terrors in the film, truly brings it to new heights of terror. Like its name suggests, this film will burrow its way into your brain and infest the audience with fear and terror that lingers, potentially, for a lifetime, making Infested one of the best horror movies in recent memory.
Screening during The Overlook Film Festival 2024.
Available on Shudder April 26th, 2024.
Final Score: 4.5 out of 5.
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Categories: Films To Watch, In Theaters, Recommendation, Reviews, streaming
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