At The Movies: French horror Infested has bite, K-noir Revolver misses the mark

Infested (NC16)

106 minutes, opens on Aug 29
★★★★☆

The story: Exterminators are no help when poisonous, rapidly reproducing spiders invade a tenement complex placed under quarantine and locked down by the police.

Kaleb (Theo Christine) is a 20something who hustles black market Nikes and collects exotic animals – one of which, an eight-legged spinner, escapes from his apartment to begin evolving in both size and numbers. The spiders in the French horror Infested, armies of them, kill instantly with a single bite.

Director Sebastien Vanicek’s film debut need not be particularly scary nor original in concept to impress nonetheless as an excellent genre piece.

It is a social allegory part Arachnophobia (1990), part Attack The Block (2011) – relocated to Kaleb’s crumbling low-income housing project in the Paris banlieue, where the plumbing and heating are scary enough without the Arab, African and Asian population now finding themselves sealed off.

The residents are hence trapped among the arachnids that can be heard skittering around the picture’s edges before inevitably swarming their victims. Vanicek is resourceful with his low-budget, dread-inducing animatronic effects. There is carnage and panic.

Kaleb, his estranged sister (Lisa Nyarko) and their three friends (Sofia Lesaffre, Jerome Niel and Finnegan Oldfield) are forced together, battling the cops to escape the blocked exits.

They are believable in their anger, which grows bigger and bigger like the spiders.

Also like the arthropods trafficked from a desert in the Middle East, the immigrants in this story are perceived as an invasive species neglected and abandoned by the state to be eradicated.

“Vermin” is the movie’s French title – what is it referring to?

Hot take: There is more to this survival drama than creepy-crawlies – although, even as just a creature feature, Infested is tense and energetic.

Revolver (PG13)

114 minutes, opens on Aug 29
★★☆☆☆

The story: South Korean star Jeon Do-yeon headlines a tale of betrayal and revenge as a police inspector promised a handsome reward for taking the fall in a corruption scandal. Two years later, she is released from prison – but where is the money?

Jeon won best actress at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival for limning a widow’s grief in Secret Sunshine (2007), and her 2023 Netflix hit Kill Boksoon showed she could handle action too.

Even so, Revolver has her doing nothing except look ill-tempered. In this K-noir more slow-moving than slow-burn, the double-crossed heroine stalks determinedly through a labyrinthine quest to claim the 700 million won (S$683,000) that is simply not worth the tedium.

A degenerate played by Ji Chang-wook, along with Kim Jong-soo’s plutocrat and Kim Jun-han’s dirty cop, are among the under-written, somehow interconnected characters she looks up one by one to solve the widening conspiracy. None of them is pleased to see her.

Squid Game (2021 to present) star Lee Jung-jae has a guest appearance as her detective-chief lover.

The single vital spark is Lim Ji-yeon from Netflix series The Glory (2022 to 2023), whose coquettish bar hostess is either friend or foe, and attempts sisterly bonding over shots of whisky.

There is a lack of narrative momentum, though certainly not big-name talent – including director Oh Seung-uk, who brought Jeon back to Cannes in 2015 with gangster romance The Shameless.

The major players eventually converge on a mountain path for an absurdist confrontation. These 20 minutes are amusing, and such a black comedy is perhaps what the movie should have aimed for from the start.

Hot take: Monotony is the killer in this crime drama.