Yuck. Consider me traumatized! I bet Australians and others aren't very impressed with those "small" spiders but for me those are monsters right out of hell. It'll take a while before I can put on a shoes again without looking in it first. I was going to say this is not a movie for arachnophobes but it's the opposite, it's horror so it's meant to scare the shit out of you... I will most likely have nightmares.
Killer intro sequence. Lots of sequences with spiders, they take a big chunk of the runtime thankfully. The first half looks like it was done with real spider specimens and the second half is CGI for obvious reasons but it looks realistic enough. The scenes with the real spiders are so much more tense and effective though. Some nice practical effects and set pieces. Good pacing and lots of action in the second half. The characters have a bit of development (the two siblings at least) but most of them are generic. The drama is hit and mostly miss, some of it is wayyy overdone and laughable.
It was all going so well until the police showed up, they weren't necessary at all. Stick with the spiders and let our main characters deal with them. It transformed the movie into something campy after that until the end and I can't say it worked very well compared to the actual scares before that. Still a pretty good creature feature overall.
On the one hand, there's some solid monster horror to be found in this movie. If you love, hate or fear spiders, you will definitely be served.
On the other hand, I don't like the gangster setting in general, and especially the character Kaleb is one of the biggest asshole protagonists I've ever seen.
He gets his best childhood friend crippled, wrongly accuses him of talking to the police, and then abandons him. Later, he mishandles dangerous neobiota which kill all of the tenants in the building, he attacks the officials coming to help, gets them killed too, blames it all on them, and finally potentially risks the lives of so many more people by breaking quarantine.
I hoped he would die painfully in the end.
But he didn't, so I really disliked that.
grosse surprise ma note exacte est de 75
On the horror side, it's good. Spiders multiplying and growing, invading the whole building. Well, given the timeline it looks lie they have one generation every 10 minutes, but who cares. Slight disappointment that the biggest one is only about half car sized though, I expected more excess.
Tension and fear are well handled, building throughout and with some good core scenes.
However, I found it culturally shocking. Characters are mostly young people living in "underprivileged suburbs" to use the term in the summary above. If presented to me without context, I would have said it was almost propaganda designed to make these people look bad. However I saw it following a presentation by the movie's team and it was clear that they felt this was their origin, and they were clearly proud to represent themselves this way, in a movie by them, for them.
The shocking point is about character interaction. Apart from the couple exchanging normally between themselves a few times, and 2-3 instances where a younger character speaks respectfully to another one, there is almost nothing, in the whole movie, that could be considered a dialogue.
Whether addressing a friendly neighbor, or an annoying one, a customer, a friend, a brother or sister, a cop, no matter who, they do not speak at each other. They bark. They shout. They insult. They provoke. They assault. They threaten. They demean. Constantly. On every single sentence. And it's all one way communication. There's no dialogue, no answering to the other. Casual conversation does not exist. Everything is a conflict, a contest of who shouts the louder their aggressive affirmation.
This is crazy. It's literally exhausting to watch.
Doesn't help that the main character is a piece of shit. He behaves like he's the white knight of the neighborhood,but the way he treats everybody, including his sister... Everything is his fault, but that does not seem to even occur to him (until maybe very late). Plus backstory with his ex best friend showing he was also a huge asshole in the past.
Backstory that is a bit wasted, by the way, since it's only evoked once the guy is dead, and even if there were a few hints, because of the dialogue issue evoked above, there was basically no way to understand that they even knew each other beforehand. He's not talked to with animosity, but not more than the other friend. He's clearly not welcome and told to fuck off, but so is the sister.
Last but not least, the ending. They just break the quarantine and it's the end. Flash forward to a bit after with no talk of any other consequences.
They were spiders. That kill in a few minutes. That went from one to thousands, and from tiny to cattle size basically overnight. At a moment where it's shown that dozens of heavily armed and armored cops can do nothing to stop them. And they just break the quarantine and get out ?? Let's be clear, there's no way they didn't unleash this on the whole city and are not responsible from tens of thousands deaths.
When it comes to spider films, It's better than most but definitely was cheese infested at times.
The impressions, like in that joke, are twofold. On the one hand, the film is certainly competent within the framework of such a plot, where people already live such a semi-marginal life and here you are, fight for it too. On the other hand, the framework is narrow, it’s difficult to imagine anything else . And I liked the characters, they’re so French:tokyo_tower:
Great performances from everyone involved. The french do the best horror for sure.
.
A great, creepshow of a horror movie. It's a really serious Eight Legged Freaks, skin crawling and playing on that arachnophobia. Some grizzly moments and some great effects throughout, thoroughly enjoyable movie.
I've never been "officially" diagnosed as having arachnophobia but because of a childhood incident, I can tell you that I have an absolute almost-paralyzing fear of spiders. Seriously, if we find one in the house, someone else has to kill it because I can't; if I can muster the strength to move, I leave the room (or, in some cases, the entire house). With that being said, I still have this boy-like revulsion/fascination with spiders (actually, arachnids in general because that includes scorpions) and I've always found "spider" movies to be some of the best to completely jar my nerves and give me a good fright. In Infested there was no shortage of creepy moments but overall, I found the movie to lean far more towards "implied horror" rather than actually creepy/scary moments. There were (for arachnophobes, anyway) a few "jump scare" scenes but even those were limited; the implied horror/kill scenes were there but the actual...I don't know the right terminology...the actual "Oh my god, I can't believe that just happened!" horrific scenes were not by any means rampant. The big "reveal" (IMO) at the 1:04:35 mark was probably one of the better scenes throughout; that was enough to give pretty much anyone a decent case of the heebie-jeebies. And without revealing any spoilers, I have to confess that the "Jordy" scene (beginning right around the 1:12:40 mark thru 1:15:01) was extremely well-acted and very moving. Granted, the musical score helped but the acting - especially in that one scene - was very over-the-top. Kudos to the cast involved in that one particular scene for putting their very soul into it. This was a French-made movie with English subtitles (not dubbing, thank goodness!) so I wasn't sure about it going in but it was actually a very well-made film. There wasn't a lot of backstory (regarding the deceased mom) but the story didn't really call for it so, IMO, that was actually a "good" thing. The ending was a bit of a surprise (to me, as I was expecting something quite different) and actually a little refreshing when compared to most of the "horror" movies being put out these days. Overall, I found this to be just enough of a creepfest to be fun, a bit nerve-jangling, but nothing to give you nightmares about. Speaking only for myself, as the film progressed I found it to become decreasingly "scary" or horrific. It stopped well short of being "ridiculous" (ala Tarantula from 1954 or Big-Ass Spider from 2013) but just sort of "lost its edge" right there near the conclusion. But again, that's just ME and my weird sense of something-akin-to-arachnophobia. While I wouldn't watch it again (once you've seen it, you've seen it) it was definitely fun watching it and well worth the time to watch it. Be advised that the opening scene appears to be a group of Arabs (?) in the desert so even though the film has English subtitles, this opening scene DOES NOT offer English subs. (At least, the version that I watched didn't.)
ALSO FOR ANYONE WITH EPILEPSY OR OTHER LIGHT-SENSITIVE DISORDERS Be advised that near the ending, there are numerous scenes where bright flashes of light, flares, headlights, flashlights, etc are being used and might trigger a reaction. Just a PSA for those who might want to be forewarned.
Biggest question of the entire movie: How did ONE SPIDER manage to multiply and become a jillion (give or take a few) little spiders? There was a VERY brief - and lame - attempt at an explanation but absolutely no backstory or anything to support that one brief version of what might have happened.
I didn't really get the point of letting out the spiders in the end, it's just like "let's kill the world"?
The main guy both indirectly and directly was responsible for every death, and a complete a**hole... The best ending I could hope for is for him to die, but I guess he got his way instead and ended up killing not only all his friends but at least the entire city as well.
I am left wondering if the director or writer is anti-social and wants the world to burn.
Swarms of spiders and everything is very well done, incredible scenes that take your breath away, I like the camera movement that makes everything more scary in the scenes that have more action. The cast has well-developed characters and a cool story, but it could have been a little more dynamic in its development, the movie ends up being a little longer.
Shout by XiofireBlockedParent2024-05-04T10:45:39Z
French melodrama only aids this all too relatable, skin-crawling creature feature that'll shake anyone who has even the slightest arachnophobia. Tingly horror which has a layer of depth with its drugs and societal hierarchy metaphors, Infested is a great modern popcorn horror that's sure to be a crowd pleaser. I'll now be checking every wall and crevice in my house for the foreseeable future.