In the Flesh: Infested

Fear of spiders is so commonplace that virtually everyone knows the clinical term for it, but making audiences feel the unreasoning, hysterical intensity of that fear is a completely different order of business. Sébastien Vaniček’s Infested captures that feeling exactly, earning the descriptor “skin-crawling” with more nightmarish urgency than anything else in recent memory. Its tense, claustrophobic shots of a run-down French apartment building convey a primal anxiety resistant to even the most rigorous analysis. The minute that first spider leaps from a hole in the Arabian desert, your brain is devoted entirely to screaming at you not to let it touch you. It’s a fascinating cinematic device, because the film is also deeply concerned with that same maddened and horrified attitude toward immigrants. Vaniček is inviting us to consider our own reflexive disgust at the outsider in the context of a true infestation, a seething horde of mindless arachnids growing ever larger with each successive generation in a panicked evolutionary response to being taken out of their element. In that light, the racist paranoia Gilles (Emmanuel Bonami) directs at his Black and brown neighbors goes from the merely hateful to the absurd. 

More than once Vaniček gives us the gut-churning spectacle of some self-appointed authority figure attempting to force our protagonists to die compliantly for their own convenience. Gilles tries to beat Kaleb (Théo Christine) and his cohort back into their overrun apartment in his zealous desire to obey the police. The police themselves try to trap them in a web-draped access corridor, bellowing “Nobody’s dying!” at the tenants fighting desperately to escape the building. That corridor scene is as stiff a test of nerves as anything I’ve watched in years. The inclusion of the timed light switch, a classic landlordism rationing tenant access to something as fundamental as light, builds tension to almost unbearable extremes, and Lila’s (Sofia Lesaffre) crippling arachnophobia and consequent whimpering and near-breakdown blends smoothly into the nightmarish Foley work used to simulate arachnid bodies in motion. By the time a character walks face-first into a hanging swag of silk, the whole thing already feels like a nightmare unfolding in slow motion.

The script, penned by Vaniček with screenwriter Florent Bernard, deftly positions its characters as likable but completely unsuited to their situation. They crumble believably under the constant sensory onslaught, breaking down again and again, making terrible decisions, fighting pointlessly amongst themselves. It’s a deeply human portrayal of people in crisis, and it invests each nightmarishly tense scene with a relatable, grounding quality. These people aren’t Ellen Ripley, they don’t have nerves of steel, they’re just regular, fucked up shmucks stuck in a perfect storm of catastrophes. Infested is a rock-solid piece of genre filmmaking with just enough political venom to make its bite impossible to forget.