Being Film #6 for Hooptober 2024
We’ve see a lot of films that are one thing on the surface and something else underneath. Infested, the French spider creature feature from Sébastien Vaniček in his feature debut is very much two things, but both are very much on the surface and striking in their forcefulness. You want a film to make your skin crawl with a bunch of eight-legged nasties that defy the laws of nature and do terrible things to you? You got it. You want to see some biting (ha!) social commentary on class and race and bigotry? You got that, too. You get a lot in Infested, and it’s a damn fine debut from a filmmaker on the rise.
THE QUICK SUMMARY: Kaleb is a young banlieue resident of Paris, trying to do his best to charm the young girl in his building, keep away from his former best friend and stop fighting with his sister over their deadmother’s dilapidated apartment she wants to renovate and sell. A trip to the back of a convenience store scores him some earrings and another find: an exotic spider, perfect for his wildlife collection he dreams of turning into a zoo for kids someday. Unfortunately Kaleb didn’t watch the prologue of this film or he would have seen just how fast, venomous, and resistant to poison these little (for now) critters are. Soon his new pets escapes, reproduces, and grows at an alarming rate, threatening his life, his friends’ lives…the whole building. But who cares, right? These kids are just the scum of the hood, and we soon see that the lives of Kaleb and his friends matter as little to the police and “proper” citizens as the spiders. Social parallels, I dub thee Infested!
Vaniček knows how to balance the monster scares with his commentary, and although Infested never shies away from its parallels of the residents’ lives and the lives of the spiders, he always sure to his film scary and fun. And in Théo Christine he has a bonafide star, the man’s charisma pouring off the screen as the beleaguered Kaleb. Infested takes its time to really grow its characters, and Christine is the centerpiece, never being a Hollywood style hero, instead really grounding Kaleb as a young man hiding plenty of pain and growing through that over the course of the film. I was surprised in Infested’s third act that it shifts into an exploration of toxic masculinity, as Kaleb walks through what happened between he and his former best friend Jordy, realizing his own faults in the split that is forever his burden to carry. It’s another smart move of Vaniček and his screenplay, written with Florent Bernard to not have this turn into a flaccid romance: the primary relationships are between Kaleb and Jordy, and Kaleb and his sister Manon, another great performance by Lisa Nyarko.
But if what you’re really interested in is the spider action, you get that in spades. These spiders follow the “fast zombie” rule and are terrifying in their speed, numbers, and ultimately their size. You get spiders bursting into hundreds of baby spiders, spiders coming out of shower drains, spiders hiding in shoes, and – finally – massive spiders fighting a SWAT team in a parking garage. They look fantastic, almost alien in their movements, even when Vaniček is using real spiders.
I’ve read the scuttlebutt around town saying Vaniček is now directing one of the two Evil Dead films in development. If so, we’re going to be in very capable hands. Check this out, it’s going to work its way into you.
Cinema Dual 
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