Review: ‘Infested,’ guaranteed to make you squirm

Sébastien Vanicek’s directorial debut feature is an impressive achievement. Packed with eight-legged creepy crawlies, the film sits between Arachnophobia and Kingdom of the Spiders. Infested guarantees to raise the hairs on the nape of your neck, make your skin crawl, and upset your stomach. With a tension-filled script co-written with Florent Bernard, Vanicek’s first outing excels in injecting the creature feature genre with much-needed venom.

Théo Christine stars as Kaleb, a loner with a fixation on exotic animals. He lines his bedroom with heat lamps and glass tanks containing various creatures that probably shouldn’t be in the hands of the general population. When he buys a poisonous spider from a local bazaar, Kaleb keeps it trapped inside a shoebox until he can snag its own glass tank later in the day. He’s well-meaning but naive. The spider quickly munches its way through the cardboard and escapes, vanishing inside his room to begin its web-spinning and egg-laying.

Kaleb and his sister Lila (Sofia Lesaffre) are currently renovating their late mother’s old apartment, their inheritance. Tensions are high, supplying the emotional friction between the characters and rooting the film in place. When Kaleb returns that evening, he witnesses a ghastly sight that sets in motion the film’s agonizingly uncomfortable story. Spiders hatch and make their way through the air ducts and into other areas of the apartment building and begin picking off residents one by one. Soon enough, the arachnids have claimed the entire property, thus trapping the remaining residents inside a concrete tomb.

Sequestered inside a high rise, Kaleb and company must fight for their lives to find a way out. The sticky mausoleum supplies a smorgasbord of opportunities to make the viewer’s skin dance on their bones. Such moments as the shower scene are tricks of tension, lassoing the viewer and yanking them kicking and screaming into the story. One of the film’s most heart-pounding, nail-biting sequences involves the characters making their way through a tunnel to the garage that’s infested with spiders, big and small. The sequence drags on forever, instilling within the audience the dire state of affairs.

Infested makes great use of its location, as the paint-flaked walls crush upon the characters. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Vanicek lets the tension build and build until it erupts in the final confrontation. In discovering that fire is their friend in warding off and slaying their shared enemy, the group sets aside their differences and bands together to decimate the clusters of fang-toothed fiends.

Sébastien Vanicek directs the creature feature with prickly precision. He lets the pressure expand before puncturing the air from the room before it balloons outward again. Moments suffocate you, so much so you may even hold your breath for literally minutes at a time. The audience is put through the wringer with moments that tingle the spine.

With no way out (unless you press pause, of course), the viewer is forced into a dark, sticky web — becoming a character clawing to escape, even if you are in the comfort of your own home. You might even turn all the lights on and hunt down the vermin lurking in the dusty corners of your home. Infested is effective in that it seizes you by the shoulders and immerses you in a vat of wriggling appendages and toxin-dripping teeth.

Infested hits Shudder this Friday (April 26). Tune in, if you dare.

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