‘You interested in animals?’
I like to think of myself as a rational and logical man most of the time. Whether my wife would agree is a different matter and one that I won’t be commenting on at this time. That being said, I am irrationally terrified of spiders. I know they can’t hurt me (not in the UK anyway). I know they’re more scared of me than I am of them. And yet I can’t shake the feeling that they want to get in my mouth to lay their eggs. Despite the fact that millions of people around the world share my fear of spiders, there are surprisingly few films that tackle arachnophobia. Infested takes the irrational fear of the noble spider and uses it to force the viewer to confront their own irrational fear of immigration…
A friendship group that lives in a multicultural suburb of Paris finds themselves battling a mutant race of giant spiders after exotic animal lover Kaleb (Théo Christine) accidentally unleashes the spiders after buying one for his collection. What an absolutely stupid dickhead.
Writer-director Sébastien Vaniček, making his feature film debut, mixes CGI with the use of 200 very real giant huntsman spiders to create a film that genuinely had my skin crawling throughout. Anyone who has ever nurtured a fear of spiders will recognise many of the set pieces here from their very worst nightmares. Indeed, there were at least three moments in which I considered what I would do in the situation being played out on screen and could only land on setting myself on fire as the best course of action.
While the central message of Infested may be a little overdone (although it is sadly as relevant as ever), the horror itself is suitably horrifying and anyone with a fear of spiders will no doubt have their life ruined for weeks by watching this film as I have done. Now, let me just go and check every corner of my house again whilst weeping uncontrollably.
