Infested

Attack the Block for entomology. The scene of walking through the hallway to the garages, which felt like a challenge from Fort Boyard accompanied by shouts of allez, allez, vas-y, vas-y, served as a turning point where arachnophobia started to be somewhat forcibly replaced by capiophobia (fear of two-legged arthropods with pincers). At the same time, the inverse relationship began to be confirmed: the bigger the spider, the less authentic the sense of dread (the bathroom attack remained unsurpassed). When the problem on the outskirts of society was finally brought down, I remembered Kandisha by the duo of Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury and started wondering if there was something deeper to be found behind it... (05/06/2024)

A very weak, generic genre film. A group of young adults are trapped in a spider's web along with the entire residential building due to one single mistake. In the place I watched it, they really tried hard and placed artificial spider webs and spiders, but that's pretty much all that can be remembered positively about it. (05/14/2024)

In the history cinema dating back more than a century, we can count the number of high-quality arachnocentric horror movies on the fingers of one hand, or maybe both hands if we squint our eyes. And I am pleased that their ranks newly include this French spider spectacular.  However, the experience that it provides depends heavily on the extent of your arachnophobia, because it’s not about likable characters or nice landscapes. It rather takes place in an apartment block on a French social housing estate and its protagonists are rebellious odd-jobbers and adolescents whose survival will be of no concern to you until the final quarter of the film. But the apartment building has a brilliant circular design patterned on a spider web, the spiders multiply rapidly and actually look like real, live spiders (in a French genre film by young enthusiasts!), and more than one scene is so intensely scary that you’ll get goosebumps and hold your breath. The fourth star is for the cinema experience with good sound. [Sitges Film Festival] (10/12/2023)

What an intense ride. I haven't squirmed in my seat like that in a long time. Vermines is an instant classic, right up there with Arachnophobia in the spider horror subgenre. The filmmakers nailed the perfect blend of practical effects, CGI, and live spiders, making it incredibly effective. If you have a severe fear of spiders, this film will leave you physically unsettled. I never expected something like this to come out of France, and even more surprising, it's a debut. I'm looking forward to seeing more from Vaniček in the future. (10/12/2023)

The only thing worse than finding a spider in your apartment is losing a spider in your apartment. Just such an event in the film results in the infestation of a whole apartment building with venomous fiddlebacks (or whatever they were) from the basement to the attic, where the spiders multiply at a startling rate, each time growing significantly larger than their antecedents, in which case the film flirts a bit with science fiction at the end. The realistic setting of an apartment building in a social housing estate and the fresh, energetic approach of the young filmmaker are exactly what the arachno-horror genre need. After the long exposition with the introduction of the characters, the action gains proper intensity, which it constantly escalates so that some scenes border on being unbearable, especially for people who are repelled by spiders. Absolutely everyone will squirm in their seats. Vermin is the best spider horror movie since Arachnophobia from 1990. (10/14/2023)