QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TIFF ROMANIA

Don’t let the French hip-hop score at the beginning of the film and the young cast fool you into thinking this is your average teen scream fodder. While indeed appealing to young audiences, Infested is a highly contagious horror with the potential contaminate viewers of all ages. A real manna from heaven (or hell) for anyone hungry for a little creepy-crawly fun.

Twenty-year-old(ish) Kaleb (Théo Christine) lives his sister Manon (Lisa Nyarko) in a tiny council flat, and their communication consists of little more than snide comments and insults. That’s because fell out over a matter of inheritance. He also has a fraught relationship with Jordy (Finnegan Oldfield), once his best friend, for stinging reasons we learn in the second half of this 105-minute story. They haggle over every inch of the apartment: the skilled Manon devotes herself to renovation, while her seemingly lazy brother keeps reptiles in a temperature-controlled room. The allegiance of Jordy and his girlfriend Lila (Sofia Lesaffre) lies firmly with the female sibling. Kaleb is an often misunderstood young adult, with friends and neighbours frowning upon his exotic hobby, and also convinced that he trades drugs.

Virtually the entire film takes place inside a brutalist council block, consisting of 15 floors and resembling a giant coin standing vertically. The corridors are narrow, the walls are grey and the view onto a sea of grey buildings offers little respite. The residents live sedentary lives with little interest in one another, and a profound mistrust in our four protagonists. The social settings look very authentic, aided by very strong performances, and credible dialogue. This touch of realism is offset by the washed-out, milky colour palette, which provide the movie with an outlandish atmosphere. The perfect balance between the credible and the fantastic.

The first half an hour of the story focuses on the family and friend relationships and neighbourliness, allowing viewers to forge a genuine emotional bond with the characters. There is some subtle racial commentary: the majority of people confined to this ugly suburban dwelling are either Black or Arab, including the lead characters. The only exception is white Jordy, who is well aware of his racial privilege. Tension begins to built from the outset because Kaleb has a acquired a mysterious spider that can crawl under the skin of its victims and cause a horrific death, We learn about the animal’s abilities in the movie’s opening scene, as a trader of exotic insects is attacked by one such creature in the desert. Kaleb, however, believes that the “beautiful” little animal is harmless. Until it reproduces and spreads like wildfire across the ventilation system into virtually every chamber of the building.

Our young heroes scramble to alert the neighbours and break free, only to find out that the authorities have quarantined the entire block. So they desperately seek to survive inside the death trap that their building has become, in a predicament very similar to the characters of REC (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2007), the first instalment of the highly successful Spanish horror franchise.

Sébastien Vaniček’s directorial debut is very impressive. Tension builds up just at the right pace, beginning with one small spider and ending with an infestation of insects of all sizes, and spiderwebs so big that they resemble a Winter Wonderland walk. Despite the absurd speed in which the creatures grow and reproduce, taking Darwinian theory to a brand new level, the movie never looks tawdry and cheap. Remarkably, there is very little gore. Blood is barely featured in the story, which instead prioritises human corpses trapped in cocoons, and the arachnids crawling out of orifices. Despite the fast-escalating developments and deaths, it is still possible to establish a strong connection with the protagonists, and empathise with their personal frustrations. Something the majority of slasher and teen scream movies fail to do.

Infested showed in the Full Moon section of the 23rd edition of Tiff Romania. The movie available for streaming on Shudder. With the American arm of Netflix chipping in, it’s likely the film will soon be available on the platform.