Infested is a French horror movie that pits the residents of a run-down apartment building up against a horde of venomous spiders. It was recently released on Shudder, and I honestly to god can not recommend this movie to anyone with arachnophobia because this movie is terrifying to anyone who doesn’t like spiders.Â
Infested, or Vermin depending on where you’re seeing it, follows Kaleb, an isolated man who has an affinity for exotic animals. He purchases a venomous spider one day, only for it to escape, repopulate, and wipe out the apartment complex he lives in.Â
The movie uses real spiders as often as they can, which is the touch that separates a movie like this and Sting (read my review here). While the movie does slow itself down at times to develop our characters, the rest of the time the tension is palpable. We see the spiders disperse throughout rooms and hallways and swarm the poor residents we follow. They pounce, they trap the people in webs, and come crawling out of their mouths. It’s so unsettling and I had goosebumps that I kept mistaking for a spider on me.Â
The one thing I wasn’t a big fan of was the third act. The spiders are reaching their maximum height and we are pretty much down to the remaining friends and some straggling residents. The movie had established the building was on police lockdown and our group had a meaningless fight with those police. The focus of the movie should have stayed with the spiders, not incorporate a cop storyline. It just pads some time until the spiders return and the movie ends.
Which, speaking of the ending, feels incomplete. The survivors escape and then the building is condemned and is detonated. There’s no satisfying conclusion of the humans vs the spiders at all. No one really talks about what happened and where they’re going to go next, and we never even get some resolution of the spiders. A lot of movies (like Sting) show the creature’s death but hint at survivors in case they want to make another movie or even want to just end on a stinger.Â
What is satisfying is the movie ends with Kaleb seeing a normal spider on him and instead of being scared and killing it, he sets it down in nature safely. It goes a lot to his character, as he loves all his creatures as they fill the void people left in him.Â
FINAL THOUGHTS
Infested is incredibly creepy. It loses some momentum at times, especially when the cops are on screen. But the horror of the spiders is so well down, especially with the sound design. As I said, if you have arachnophobia, skip this one, but if you can stomach the crawlers, this is a good watch.
