Vermines

Vermines est une sorte d'Arachnophobie à la française. On y trouve des personnages assez atypiques et pas vraiment sympathiques, l'environnement sale d'un immeuble à appartements de base et une dose très limitée d'humour, mais aussi de l'action solide, un terrorisme arachnide très direct et quelques scènes qui vous feront vous tortiller d'inconfort dans votre siège de cinéma. Le film utilise des créatures physiques dans de nombreuses scènes, et quand il passe aux effets générés par ordinateur, ce n'est pas du tout perceptible, ce qui fait que les visuels réalistes contribuent beaucoup à l'impact sur le public. Il n'y a sans doute pas beaucoup de bons films d'horreur avec des araignées dans l'histoire du cinéma, mais je dirais que celui-ci en fait clairement partie. [Sitges 2023] (12/10/2023)

En plus de cent ans d’histoire du cinéma, les films d’horreur de qualité avec des araignées se comptent sur les doigts d’une seule main, voire de deux si l’on plisse les yeux. Et je me réjouis que cette virée arachnéenne française en fasse désormais partie. Toutefois, votre expérience du film dépendra fortement de votre degré d’arachnophobie, car il ne s’agit pas ici de personnages sympathiques ou de jolis paysages. À la place, le film se déroule dans un immeuble de cité française, et ses héros sont de petits délinquants et adolescents rebelles dont la survie ne commencera à vous importer qu’au dernier quart du film. Mais l’immeuble est brillamment conçu de forme circulaire sur le modèle d’une toile d’araignée, les araignées deviennent de plus en plus nombreuses et semblent vivantes (dans un film de genre français réalisé par de jeunes passionnés !), et plus d’une scène vous donnera la chair de poule et vous fera retenir votre souffle par l’intensité de la frayeur qu’elle suscite. La quatrième étoile vaut pour une expérience en salle de cinéma avec un bon sound system. [Festival du film de Sitges] (12/10/2023)

Sébastien Vaniček and his instant ticket to the A-Horror League. I'm gonna go give out prizes, because this is where history is made. So Vaniček made a dream debut (right on the lines of the recent successful debutants like Robert Eggers, Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, Zach Cregger), the best spider horror film of all time (it's quite funny that the previous king is already 30 years, Arachnophobia), kicked off this year's French wave and at the same time made the best horror film of the year – no one could ask for a better way to start. Whether Infested will be dethroned by the new Alien or Nosferatu at the end of the year is another matter, but until then it can enjoy the pedestal merrily. And now for the film. After a long time, I experienced very uncomfortable feelings with horror, and since ghosts and demons don't do anything to me, spiders as a real evil definitely had an effect. The housing estates of the French ghetto evokes an interesting atmosphere in itself, you don’t get to really form much of a relationship with the characters but that didn't bother me. The craftsmanship is excellent and once it gets going, it really is a spider atmospheric hell crammed with jump-scares like Sam Raimi's Drag me to Hell, and I twitched along decently (I also praise the aptly chosen musical score!). Admittedly, it got more intense as the spiders got smaller, but even the big ones had something going for them – that's where the CGI came in handy. It's a bit marred by the ending, I was expecting a bigger carnage, the mass battle spiders vs cops was over too quickly for my taste, and the whole thing ends quite hastily – I could have easily managed 20 minutes more – but these are minor flaws in the beauty of a film that is born once every three decades. Anyone who doesn't appreciate that is an arrogant scumbag and an enemy of the state and me. 9/10. (28/04/2024)

Infested can most easily be described as a mix of Arachnophobia, REC, and Evil Dead Rise, and it's really no wonder Sébastien Vaniček was put in charge of the next addition to the latter franchise. This debut is an instant ticket to the premier horror league, managing to make a perfectly crafted, very intense film that doesn't have much competition within the spider horror genre. Especially, as long as the creatures are small and nimble, it worked for me 100% and I twitched with very high frequency. I don't even want to imagine how much better this film would have worked if it had more likeable characters that you cared about. The protagonists are, for me at least, the biggest stumbling block, especially the fact that their characters imply some very questionable decisions, which at one point exceeded my tolerance level. There is a thing one of the characters does about 15 minutes before the end that wouldn't have been done by the most anti-system asshole at that point, there's just no justification for it. It's exactly the moment when, as a viewer, I stop "experiencing" what's happening on the screen and start saying WTF instead. (05/03/2024)

The only thing worse than finding a spider in your apartment is losing a spider in your apartment. Just such an event in the film results in the infestation of a whole apartment building with venomous fiddlebacks (or whatever they were) from the basement to the attic, where the spiders multiply at a startling rate, each time growing significantly larger than their antecedents, in which case the film flirts a bit with science fiction at the end. The realistic setting of an apartment building in a social housing estate and the fresh, energetic approach of the young filmmaker are exactly what the arachno-horror genre need. After the long exposition with the introduction of the characters, the action gains proper intensity, which it constantly escalates so that some scenes border on being unbearable, especially for people who are repelled by spiders. Absolutely everyone will squirm in their seats. Vermin is the best spider horror movie since Arachnophobia from 1990. (14/10/2023)