Infested (2023)

Sébastien Vaniček's feature debut deposits a lethal desert spider in a rundown tower block outside Paris and lets nature take its course. The building is the Arènes de Picasso in Noisy-le-Grand, and the residents are Arab and Black, which in a French genre film counts as a deliberate choice. Vaniček has said so himself. He drew a line between spiders, reviled for how they look and how they move, and banlieue residents, reviled for where they come from. The parallel is not buried in subtext. It is the architecture of the thing, and the film treats its young leads as protagonists with names, grudges, and dead mothers, not as set dressing for a monster.

That social layer is genuine and it is specific. The plot runs on racial and class discrimination, on a police cordon that gases and shoots at people trying to flee, on a xenophobic neighbor who assumes any transaction between Arab men must be narcotics. The critique lands on the state and its policing, not on capital, and the sneaker-dealing subplot reads as texture more than argument. The women in the group are capable and two of them walk out alive, though the film advances no thesis about them. Beyond that, the cupboard is bare. No ecological parable, no body politics, no neurodivergent readings, no history in need of correction, and nothing in the way of romance worth cataloguing.

And yet the sermon never arrives. Vaniček keeps his ideas inside the genre machinery, where they belong, and the result is a tight, nasty, well-built creature feature with two hundred real huntsman spiders and a finale that several critics found anticlimactic. The message is present. It is just not shouted.