Review: INFESTED (VERMINES)

There’s a new French horror on Netflix called Infested (Vermines in French) and who doesn’t love a good spider movie?

I’m fond of spiders. Back in the day, I had terrible arachnophobia, to the point where I would freeze with fear. I decided to overcome this fear by learning about, and buying, a tarantula. At one point, I had 12 of them in the house and my fear soon subsided.

Every now and then, I love a good spider movie. I recently watched Tarantula: Hidden Cargo, a made-for-TV movie starring Tom Atkins and Howard Hesseman. It was a fun little outing, although silly, as we all know, the Mexican Red Knee tarantula isn’t deadly at all, it would give you a bee sting at worst.

I had heard good things about Infested and put it on last night. In a nutshell, It’s not a bad spider movie.

Infested stars Theo Christine, Sofia Lesaffre, Jerome Niel, Lisa Nyarko, Finnegan Oldfield, and Marie-Philomene Nga. Sebastien Vanicek is the writer/director, writing alongside Florent Bernard.

The Story

The story for Infested is nice and simple:

Residents of a rundown French apartment building battle against an army of deadly, rapidly reproducing spiders.

The opening credits tell us there is money to be made selling exotic creatures around the world. We open somewhere in the desert, where a group of men are looking for spiders to capture. The spiders they are after are a lot more dangerous than they think and one of the men ends up dead.

We then follow one of the spiders that ends up in a thrift shop in Paris. In the back are a lot of illegal goods, including some rare creatures. Enter Kaleb (Christine) who’s looking for some cheap, and probably stolen, earrings. He sees the spider and buys that too.

Kaleb lives in a ghetto area of Paris, dealing with stolen trainers (or sneakers for our US readers), but has a dream of opening an exotic pet store. In his bedroom, he has a very good collection and the new spider will make a great new edition.

But would you believe it, the spider gets out, starts mating and suddenly the apartment block is overrun with the 8-legged freaks. At first, they don’t seem too bad, but they get bigger and more deadly.

The rest of the story is about the people in the block trying to survive, but focusing on Kaleb and his friends. Overall, it’s a good story, with good characters, but far from perfect.

Infested Vs Other Spider Movies

One of the best of the spider movies is Arachnophobia. It’s fun, it makes you squirm in your seat, and it’s a giggle to watch. If Arachnophobia is the fun side of spider movies, Infested is the dark side. The movie is very gritty and “real”, there aren’t any laughs or light-heartedness, it’s all played for horror.

This was a good, and a bad, thing. The direction is really good, but it gets a little too serious over time. Again, this isn’t a bad thing, but the serious tone then doesn’t really fit the ending, which I won’t spoil. It’s not a terrible ending, just one that leans towards the silly.

At the end of Arachnophobia, there is an obvious fake spider, which spoils it for me. In Infested, there had to be a lot of CG, but all the spiders look and move, like real spiders. They were scary and made me squirm a little.

The cast is very good. You believe them all, and their characters are fleshed out well. In fact, the movie is more about the characters than the spiders. Arachnophobia kicks right in and has the spiders from the get-go. In Infested, they are putting towards the back a little, to make sure we get to know the main players.

Overall

Infested is a good spider horror movie and I enjoyed it. There are a few of the old trope jump scares, but they are done well. I found myself sitting there, waiting for the jump, with a big smile on my face. When a couple do happen, I did jump.

The downside of the movie is it takes itself far too seriously. There is one death and the reaction to it was far too over the top. It got to the point where I wanted the spiders to bite certain people, just to shut them up!

The filming style is really good, you can almost smell how bad the block is in places. It’s dirty, run down, nothing works and the characters are forced to live there, even though they hate it. It reminded me a lot of Attack the Block, which was more of a fun take on the “alien invasion” movie, but you got what it was like to live in that kind of area.

I’m giving Infested a solid 3.5 out of 5 stars. It’s a good horror, it’s creepy and well-made.

Infested is streaming on Netflix.