If you’ve ever looked at a shoe box and thought, “What’s the worst that could happen?”, Infested (aka Vermines) cheerfully answers: civilization. Sébastien Vaniček’s feature debut is a jittery, funny, and ferociously crowd-pleasing arachnopocalypse that treats spiders like tiny agents of chaos and social allegory—eight-legged metaphors scuttling through the cracks of a concrete high-rise and the people who live there. It’s a creature feature that remembers creatures are only half the story; the other half is people with frayed nerves, bad history, and worse timing.
Our hero, Kaleb (a terrific Théo Christine), is a hustling sneakers dealer and recovering exotic-pet enthusiast who makes one catastrophic purchase at a Paris convenience store: a lethal desert spider with a DIY approach to exponential growth. He’s that guy you know—the apartment MacGyver with a heart, a temper, and a habitat box—trying to keep his mom’s memory alive, patch things up with his sister Manon, not lose his best friend Mathys, maybe apologize to his ex-friend Jordy, and get through one (1) day without committing entomological manslaughter. Reader, he fails.
Vaniček wastes no time getting the ecosystem to revolt. Once the spider goes missing—after Kaleb flirts, fights, and gifts a pair of earrings with the charming recklessness of a man who will soon regret everything—the film locks into a siege mode worthy of the best apartment-block nail-biters. A mysterious death, a sudden lockdown, armed police outside, and inside: thin hall lights, thicker webs, and the sickening click of tiny feet becoming not-so-tiny. The building becomes a terrarium, the tenants the specimens, and every hallway a nature documentary narrated by panic.
The social commentary is not just skin-deep; it’s exoskeletal. Vaniček conceived the film as a riff on xenophobia, and you can feel that throughout: the way “infestation” rhetoric ricochets between species and citizens, how fear metastasizes into blame, and how a whole neighborhood gets quarantined because someone decided a living thing was only dangerous once it crossed the wrong threshold. Enter Gilles, the resident bigot with a baton and a talent for saying the inside-voice-part out loud; he’s convinced every problem is drugs and every solution is stabbing a shoebox. (Pro tip: not that shoebox.) There’s an acidic humor to how quickly the building’s human divisions get as sticky as the webs. The film doesn’t sermonize; it weaponizes inconvenience.
And yet, for all its thematic bite, Infested plays first as a nimble, vicious thrill machine. Vaniček and editor Florent Vassault stage sequences that hum with escalation: bathroom spiders that birth smaller horrors, an eerie hallway gauntlet where the occupants tiptoe forward in harmony with the building’s timer lights, and a fireworks-assisted sprint that turns light sensitivity into tactical advantage. The movie is constantly inventing ways to make you reconsider everyday objects—switches, sneakers, ceiling tiles—as the enemy. You’ll never trust a wall sconce again.
The practical work is wonderfully gross without becoming numbing. Spiders come in sizes ranging from “excuse me” to “new landlord,” and their onscreen behavior lands uncomfortably close to plausible. (Anyone who’s ever tried to relocate a spider with a glass and postcard will feel personally attacked.) The effects favor in-camera creep over digital swarms, giving the film that itchy authenticity that makes audiences unconsciously tuck in their pant legs. Sound design is a conspirator: the soft percussive patter of many legs, the dry rip of threads, the sudden scritch at the edge of frame. When the movie goes quiet, it’s never kind.
Of course, none of this works if you don’t care about the meat puppets trying not to get webbed. Christine’s Kaleb is the secret engine: impulsive, charismatic, and believably dumb in ways that are deeply human rather than plot-stupid. Lisa Nyarko’s Manon grounds the mayhem with bone-deep sibling exhaustion that melts into fierce loyalty; their scenes together carry a surprising tenderness, even when she’s applying pressure to a bullet wound while spiders drumroll outside the van. Jérôme Niel’s Mathys is the ride-or-die friend whose fireworks stash turns out to be both character detail and Chekhov’s ballistics. Finnegan Oldfield’s Jordy gives the film its ache; a friendship soured by a dumb teenage moment echoes through the building like a grief that never found a door. When the past comes knocking, it’s with a chitinous fist.
Vaniček’s eye for place is a gift. The banlieue here isn’t a looming monolith but a breathing, lived-in world of neighbors, clutter, colors, and grudges. The camera roves through cramped kitchens, peeling corridors, and improvised sanctuaries with an intimacy that keeps the scale honest even as the threat balloons. The film’s most striking images—the cocooned sneaker box, the silver-blue hallway of suspended bodies, the final, shocked tableau of a neighborhood collapsing—stick because they’re embedded in the fabric of a community. Disaster is not abstract; it is what happens to people you just watched bicker over a step ladder.
The movie also delights in making authority look heroically useless. The lockdown is less public safety than public theater; cops gas the wrong space, shoot at the wrong time, and manage to make a bad situation—
congratulations—worse. The lieutenant talks in policy verbs while the building turns into a buffet. It’s darkly funny, and painfully familiar, to watch institutions respond to a complex crisis with a memo and a rifle. Meanwhile, Kaleb and crew are doing the real work: improvising routes, caring for the wounded, choosing who gets the last headlamp battery, and trying not to step on anything that shrieks.
There’s a generosity to the film’s humor. Infested isn’t a smirk machine; it’s a pressure valve. The laughs come from human messiness colliding with insect efficiency: a man arguing about property values while venom dissolves his narrative, a bat-wielding bigot confusing contraband with chrysalis, a hallway negotiation with a light timer that’s basically the world’s meanest rhythm game. The film invites the audience to giggle in self-defense, and then punishes them with a new angle of attack. It’s a roller coaster designed by a biologist and a stand-up comic.
What elevates the whole enterprise is the way Vaniček lands an emotional beat without declawing the chaos. Mathys’s bite confession and choice is played without mawkishness; it’s simply a friend doing what needs doing while there’s still light. Kaleb’s late admission about Jordy—that a wound misremembered can poison a life—hits like a quiet aftershock. And the last moments—Kaleb burying a shoebox with a photograph, siblings and allies watching a home perish, a single spider blown gently from a palm—manage the tonal magic trick of being both elegy and uneasy shrug. Nature doesn’t care about our metaphors, but we do, and that’s the horror.
Is Infested perfect? No. If you’ve consumed your annual recommended dose of phobic hallway set pieces, you may recognize a rhythm or two. A couple of character decisions arrive on the express train from Plot Town. But the film’s craft, velocity, and heart flatten quibbles like, well, a rolled-up newspaper. Vaniček announces himself with command: of pacing, of space, of when to jab and when to strangle.
It’s been a minute since a creature feature made a theater wriggle as one organism, laughing in a tone only slightly higher than a scream. Infested does that. It understands that the monsters are fascinating—but the people dodging them, blaming each other, forgiving each other, and choosing who to drag toward daylight—that’s the meal. And if you leave the movie side-eyeing your sneakers, the ceiling, and any sentence beginning with “It’s just a little—,” congratulations. The film has laid eggs in your brain.
Don’t worry. They only hatch in the dark.
