Buff Review: Infested (2023) dir. Sébastien Vaniček

We don’t have enough spider movies. For how widespread arachnophobia is, there is a relative dearth of actually watchable spider horror. Beginning as early as 1955’s Tarantula, the few spider films we get center jumbo-sized arachnids — the sort you’re very unlikely to ever encounter in your bathroom. The French language Infested, or to use its alternate title Vermin, generates trepidation by using the same real-life evolutionary ques that make the small eight-legged critters scary in the first place: surprise, speed, size. It also flirts with some bigger conceptual ideas to varying degrees of success.

The new film from up-and-coming horror director Sébastien Vaniček, tagged by Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures for a future Evil Dead spin-off, falls somewhere between the creature feature and haunted house sub-genres. After a fatty prelude in Morocco, we meet Kaleb (Théo Christine), a home collector of bugs with a black market shoe (re)selling business. He lives with his sister and mourns their recently departed mother. He buys a unique and dying spider at an even shadier business and names her Rihanna. She eats her way through a shoebox, leaves a cocoon in the cold apartment, and begins laying eggs as if they require nothing more than oxygen to create. The spiderlings reproduce at the speed of electricity and each generation dwarfs the previous until eventually the black arachnids rival the size of a chunky Cocker Spaniel and infest the entire tightly-knit and predominantly minority apartment complex.

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