Director/Story – Sebastien Vanicek, Screenplay – Florent Bernard & Sebastien Vanicek, Producer – Harry Tordjman, Photography – Alexandre Jamin, Music – Xavier Caux & Douglas Cavanna, Visual Effects Supervisors – Leo Ewald & Thierry Onillon, Visual Effects – Mac Guff, Special Effects Supervisor – Julien Poncet de le Grave, Makeup Effects – Pascal Laure, Sarah Pariset & Pierre Parry, Production Design – Arnaud Bouniort. Production Company – My Box Films/Tandem/Netfix/France Televisions/Centre National du Cinema et de l’Image Animee/Impact Film/Cinecap 6/Cineaxe 5/Cofimage 34/SG Image 2022/Indiefilms 12.
Cast
Theo Christine (Kaleb), Jerome Niel (Mathys), Lisa Nyarko (Manon), Sofia Lesaffre (Lila), Finnegan Oldfield (Jordy), Marie-Philomene Nga (Claudia), Mahamadou Sangare (Moussa), Abdallah Moundy (Monsieur Benzaoui), Ike Zacsongo-Joseph (Toumani), Emmanuel Bonami (Gilles), Xing Xing Cheng (Madame Zhao)
Plot
Kaleb lives in a low income apartment building along with a number of other immigrants and gets by selling shoes. His hobby is collecting exotic insects, although his sister has a habit of turning off the power that keeps the temperature humid. He buys a new spider only for it to chew its way out of the box he places it in. The spider moves through the apartment, killing those it comes in contact with. Kaleb finds it has bred rapidly and that spiders are now overrunning the building. As he and his friends try to get everybody out, they find that the authorities have imprisoned them inside.
Infested was a feature-length debut for French director Sebastien Vanicek. The film played several international film festivals and garnered good word of mouth before being picked up for release by the Shudder network.
What takes you aback is the world that Vanicek throws us into. It is an apartment block – the uniquely designed real-life building of Picasso’s Arena in the Parisian suburb of Noisy-le-Grand. Life there seems on the edge, dirty, cramped but also a thriving community among the immigrants, different ethnic groups and unemployed. It is a very different world to the one you usually get in film – even when filmmakers are trying to portray impoverished communities. Vanicek draw a natural analogy between the titular vermin and those at the edge of the socioeconomic spectrum being regarded as similarly unwanted by Parisian society.
The giant spider film was always a province of the 1950s, a variant on the giant bug film that began with Them! (1954) – the 1950s era gave us the likes of Tarantula (1955) and Earth vs the Spider (1958). The giant spider or spider menace film has been consistently revived since with the B-budgeted likes of The Giant Spider Invasion (1975), Spiders (2000), Arachnid (2001), Big Ass Spider (2013) and Spiders (2013).
(l to r) Theo Christine, Jerome Niel, Lisa Nyarko, Finnegan Oldfield and Sofia Lesaffre face an apartment building overrun with bugs
Less popular have been films about massed attacks of regular-sized spiders but there have been a number of these with the likes of Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo (1977), Arachnophobia (1990) and Spiders in the Attic (2021). (I have a more detailed listing of these under Bugs).
On a plotting level, Sebastien Vanciek does nothing different with the spiders amok premise that various of these others do, excepting to have the residents confined within an apartment building – where the confinement by authorities resembles something of the scenario in [Rec] (2007). Where the difference is in all of this is that Vanicek frequently goes for broke in a determination to make the spiders scary.
Vanicek adopts a fast-editing style, one where he frequently has people in action all at once talking over each other, placing us in the inside seat of the chaos and madness. Amid this, he throws some jump out of your seat scenes – the spiders erupting in the bathroom as Sofia Lesaffre hides in the shower stall, or the scene where Emmanuel Bonami tears open a shoe box and is overrun by spiders. There is a particularly gruelling sequence where the group have to make their way down a hallway covered with webs and crawling spiders as the timer on the lights is about to go out.
