Official Review
The latter comparison is rooted in the film's setting: Most of Infested unfolds inside of a massive housing complex somewhere in suburban Paris, which becomes a war zone once the authorities learn about the spider-based mayhem that's unfolding within its walls. They know more than the residents about what's going on, which means that they know more than the audience as well – an approach that actually does a lot to ramp up the film's sense of paranoid tension. That's because the story is told from the perspective of Kaleb (Théo Christine), a ne'er-do-well in his late twenties living in his deceased mom's old apartment with few prospects besides an informal hustle selling fenced Nikes to his neighbors.
But Infested also spends a frustrating amount of time developing the relationships between Kaleb; his sister, Manon (Lisa Nyarko); her best friend, Lila (Sofia Lesaffre); and Lila's boyfriend (who also happens to be Kaleb's estranged childhood best friend), Jordy (Finnegan Oldfield). The frustrating part is that the only reason we're learning all of this is to give some poignancy to these characters' eventual peril and probable deaths, which makes the mind wander back to spiders, which leads to wondering why we're watching these people argue with one another when they could be covered in spiders already. (There's also social commentary at play – low-income housing occupied by people of color, institutional indifference, etc. – but thankfully it's not too heavily underlined.)
To be fair, this was not a big-budget production, which means that there's only so much spider action Vanicek and crew can put onto the screen. A sequence late in the film where arachnids attack the surviving characters en masse uses flash and noise to both enhance and distract from the minimal effects. It's a smart strategy, and one the movie uses frequently: There's a lot of chaos and yelling every time the characters are corralled into a space with or without poisonous super-spiders. That keeps the viewer's cortisol spiking, but can get tiresome after a while. Because let's face it: We're here for the spiders, baby! The creature-feature elements of Infested are all executed with panache and a great sense of tension, employing both CGI and practical effects to riff on such classics as the mirror scare and the shot where something – in this case, a whole shitload of spiders – is crawling across the ceiling above an oblivious character's head.
The body horror, while limited to a handful of scenes, is appropriately gruesome and covered in nasty, gooey pustules. The art department gets an impressive amount of mileage out of Halloween-store cobwebs, and dizzying 360-degree camera rotations do the rest of the destabilizing work. The result is the kind of film where a viewer feels compelled to shake out their pant leg afterwards to make sure there aren't any critters hiding in there, which, on an elemental level, makes Infested a success – even if it is taking an eight-legged shortcut to chills.
Verdict
The French creature feature Infested is an unqualified success in terms of its creepy-crawly horror elements. But the film's limited budget means it can only fill so much screen time with giant spider animatronics and gooey body horror, and the scenes we do see are gilded with a lot of loud, empty flash. The rest of the film is occupied with a frustrating amount of character work that doesn't go anywhere, making for a mixed viewing experience.