[Overlook 2024] INFESTED -- Spider Horror Quickly Runs Out of Steam

Review by Sean Boelman

Theo Christine in Sébastien Vanícek’s INFESTED. Courtesy of Shudder. A Shudder Release.

After debuting at last year’s Venice Film Festival, Sébastien Vanicek’s Infested is continuing its festival tour before its Shudder release. Although this might be an unsettling watch if you suffer from arachnophobia, for most audiences, it’s likely to inspire little in the way of thrills or even entertainment.

The film follows the residents of a rundown apartment building in France as they attempt to fight for their lives against a rapidly reproducing army of spiders. What follows is a run-of-the-mill creature feature, mixing jump scares and body horror. Although a few moments are quite effective, there is little about this that you haven’t seen before.

One of the most frustrating things about Infested is how overt its political allegory is. Although the horror genre is no stranger to direct symbolism, Vanicek and Florent Bernard’s thinly veiled commentary on gentrification is particularly dull because it feels almost flippant toward these themes, which are quite necessary discussions. 

This shallow social critique could almost be forgiven were it not for the fact that the characters are so underdeveloped and archetypal. Although we’re clearly rooting for the underdogs — the residents of a lower-class community fighting for survival — the personalities they’re given are about as generic as they come. As a result, it’s easy to move on as they get picked off one by one.

Théo Christine and Jérôme Niel in Sébastien Vanícek’s INFESTED. Courtesy of Shudder. A Shudder Release.

There’s also the issue of the movie’s pacing, which is far too slow. The runtime is around an hour and 45 minutes, and this is the type of story that could have been told in a brisk 90 minutes or less. It takes too long for us to get into the arachnophobia-inducing action, and when it gets there, it’s frustratingly one note.

Ultimately, this is the issue with spider-based horror movies. There are only so many ways you can make a spider look scary. The options are to have a spider go somewhere it shouldn’t be, have a bunch of spiders swarming, or have a really big spider. After a while, Vanicek runs out of ideas of things to do, and the film runs out of steam as a result. 

It’s a shame because there are a few truly inspired sequences here. One sequence, set in a hallway filled with spiders and webs, is shot in an incredibly claustrophobic way that gives the movie a much-needed burst of energy for around 15 minutes. And for a smaller produciton, the visual effects are mostly very strong.

Although Infested is a pretty generic film, it does show that director Sébastien Vanicek has a lot of promise behind the camera. And given that he’s been hired to helm the next entry in the Evil Dead franchise, we’ll certainly be seeing more of him yet. Let’s just hope that the script he writes or gets for that is less bland.

Infested is screening at the 2024 Overlook Film Festival, which runs April 4-7 in New Orleans, LA.

​Rating: 2/5