Kritiken

Infested returns the eight-legged arthropods to their rightful place at the top of the phobia mountain. Make no mistake, anyone with even the slightest distaste for arachnids should stay far away from this film; it’s a masterclass in creepy-crawly atmosphere, a dread-inducing spectacle that will have you shaking out of your clothes and checking your shoes before putting them on. It gets under the skin, so to speak.

[Infested] works mainly because director Sébastien Vaniček, making his feature debut, understands how to shoot and cut suspense and terror. I’m not a big arachnophobe, but the first time an army of tiny spider-babies crawled up one character’s arm, my body immediately bent into a shape it has never taken before or since.

The well-crafted overall experience marks the arrival of an exciting new horror voice. Even as it comes awfully close to overstaying its welcome just a bit, much like the spiders in the home of the characters, [Infested] very quickly grows on you.

In Sébastien Vanicek’s nightmarish feature debut “Infested,” there are more spiders than you can count and spiders of unusual size that weave together a frightfully stellar monster movie that will make many viewers jump, squirm, and maybe even scream.

An instant minor genre classic, it is fun and then some — a conceptually unremarkable but resourceful, energetic, stylish and good-humored creature feature with above-average human character interest.

There are no fresh ideas in the French creepy-crawler “Infested,” yet this first feature from Sébastien Vanicek scurries forward with such pep and purpose that its shortcomings are easily forgivable... While not especially scary, the movie gains traction from a script (by Vanicek and Florent Bernard) that finds ways to add a smidgen of back story to its panicked characters.

What Vaniček’s intricately crafted creature feature lacks in the specialness of its specimen it makes up for with a captivating killing den inhabited by multidimensional characters as melancholy as they are hilarious.