By Terry Sherwood
The fear of Spiders, the fear of Humans with the copper taste of another taunt French film Le Haine and you have the web of intrigue and you have Sébastien Vanicek’s Infested or Vermine. Growing like the beasties in this film you have a group of people who are the real story trapped in an iconically designed building shaped like a cross-section of a hive.
Théo Christine is Kaleb: an animal lover who helps Landlords have gang problems, never swears he will do something but instead says to trust. He struggles to make ends meet, selling high-end trainers out of a storage unit and other things He lives with his sister Manon (Lisa Nyarko) who is intent on selling their parent’s home due to money.
When Kaleb gets an illegally trafficked spider shoe supplier unwittingly unleashing a plague of spiders that multiply and grow in physical size The death, the tension, and suspense close on you like incisors as Kaleb, Manon and a host of their believable odd friends. The Tennants that they try to warn in the building have a resemblance to what could have been the Grenfell Tower inhabited by lost people, social cast-offs, and newcomers that society has lost interest in helping with tragic results, They find they are locked into protect the public
Shot in claustrophobic images with quicked edits, in parts similar to a music video with the dialogue delivered with immediacy, verisimilitude and raw emotion similar to the best work of the early Sixties French New Wave, particularly Godard and Truffaut. The intensity reaches a crescendo ( not the only one ) in a harrowing moment when Kaleb, Manon and others are trapped in a dark room listening to the death screams of their being devoured friends through an open vent.
Infested has a resolution of an almost spiritual nature but not before terror, death self-sacrifice, memories, and friendships won and lost all rip through the hearts and bodies of these trapped people like a stinger.
Infested is screening now on Shudder.
Bloody Flicks 