Infested

I'm definitely not a fan of spiders, but my curiosity lured me to the cinema to see Infested, as I have a bit of a thing for animal horror movies (about overgrown crocodiles, snakes, boars, sharks, etc.). Sébastien Vaniček's film impresses with a soundtrack I would have expected in a film about drugs or the mafia rather than deadly eight-legged creatures - though drugs are often mentioned. As far as the action-horror level is concerned, it works on the whole; here I would highlight especially the scene with the flashing corridor, which gave me solid goosebumps. But the overall experience is noticeably marred by the characters and their actions, it was really hard to root for them to escape the "web of death". (06/06/2024)

In the history cinema dating back more than a century, we can count the number of high-quality arachnocentric horror movies on the fingers of one hand, or maybe both hands if we squint our eyes. And I am pleased that their ranks newly include this French spider spectacular.  However, the experience that it provides depends heavily on the extent of your arachnophobia, because it’s not about likable characters or nice landscapes. It rather takes place in an apartment block on a French social housing estate and its protagonists are rebellious odd-jobbers and adolescents whose survival will be of no concern to you until the final quarter of the film. But the apartment building has a brilliant circular design patterned on a spider web, the spiders multiply rapidly and actually look like real, live spiders (in a French genre film by young enthusiasts!), and more than one scene is so intensely scary that you’ll get goosebumps and hold your breath. The fourth star is for the cinema experience with good sound. [Sitges Film Festival] (13/10/2023)

A very weak, generic genre film. A group of young adults are trapped in a spider's web along with the entire residential building due to one single mistake. In the place I watched it, they really tried hard and placed artificial spider webs and spiders, but that's pretty much all that can be remembered positively about it. (14/05/2024)

Infested can most easily be described as a mix of Arachnophobia, REC, and Evil Dead Rise, and it's really no wonder Sébastien Vaniček was put in charge of the next addition to the latter franchise. This debut is an instant ticket to the premier horror league, managing to make a perfectly crafted, very intense film that doesn't have much competition within the spider horror genre. Especially, as long as the creatures are small and nimble, it worked for me 100% and I twitched with very high frequency. I don't even want to imagine how much better this film would have worked if it had more likeable characters that you cared about. The protagonists are, for me at least, the biggest stumbling block, especially the fact that their characters imply some very questionable decisions, which at one point exceeded my tolerance level. There is a thing one of the characters does about 15 minutes before the end that wouldn't have been done by the most anti-system asshole at that point, there's just no justification for it. It's exactly the moment when, as a viewer, I stop "experiencing" what's happening on the screen and start saying WTF instead. (05/03/2024)

Vermines is a bit like Arachnophobia in the French way. You get rather unconventional and not very likeable characters, a grimy slum setting and a very limited amount of humour, but you also get solid action, very indiscriminate spider terror and a few scenes that will make you uncomfortable in your seat. The film uses real creatures in many scenes, and when it goes into computer-generated effects, it's not noticeable at all, so the realistic visuals do a lot for the viewer's effect. There probably aren't that many good spider horror movies historically, but this one can easily count among them. (13/10/2023)