7 – THE PLAGUE: VERMIN
(Vermines/France, 2023)
Director: Sébastien Vanicek
Screenplay: Florent Bernard and Sébastien Vanicek
Duration: 103 minutes
Starring: Théo Christine, Sofia Lesaffre, Finnegan Oldfield, Jérôme Niel and Lisa Nyarko
Premiere in theaters
https://cdn.jwplayer.com/previews/6qn085K7-buQgiLVC
A group of men in Arab clothing cross a rocky desert aboard a dilapidated truck while the sun cracks the earth. The vehicle stops, they get out, and they begin to make signals and spread out over the terrain, paying particular attention to the location of the stones. They raise it one by one, until someone finds a hole, shouts to the rest, and fills it with greenish smoke. If this were an American action movie, at this moment a convoy would enter the scene to liquidate them: it is known that for Uncle Sam’s military forces, every bearded man with a headscarf is, at the very least, a terrorist. But The Plague: Vermin He does not travel those paths, but rather other debtors of the allegorical cinema of George Romero or John Carpenter: The villains here are not the Arabs, but the spiders that extract from the underground and that, when they sting one of them, they end up causing his death not from the poison, but from the machete blow of a companion when he saw him writhing on the ground.
The fatal outcome of the opening sequence of the film by Frenchman Sébastien Vaniček –who will cross the Atlantic to command the next delivery of Evil Deadrevitalized last year with the very good The awakeningwith which The plague has several points of contact – makes it clear that this death will be the first of several problems that the arachnids will cause. Kaleb cannot know any of this when he arrives at a store where they sell everything from sneakers obtained through dubious methods to pets that are not such. Sneakers, a status symbol in the young sectors of the popular classes, operate as a desire as well as a mortal vehicle. If George Romero turned shopping customers into zombies hungry for food The awakening of the dead, Here again it will be consumerist desire that generates chaos. It happens when Kaleb sells a brand new pair of tires to one of the neighbors of the strange circular building where she lives with her sister.
Things are not going well with her: there are pending accounts, and not precisely monetary ones, since the mother died – a somewhat forced subplot that tries to provide the brothers with dramatic thickness – and now they are barreling around like hell. Given that the building is in a Parisian suburb inhabited mainly by immigrants, social containment is a general lack that shows its worst side after one of the spiders, which escaped inside one of the sneakers sold, bites the buyer. That pushes him to a horrible death and the rest of the neighbors to start a wild fight to get out of there at any cost. Because the insects, which grow faster than Alf’s cockroach, cover the ducts with cobwebs and eggs that sooner rather than later will become spiders more dangerous than mom.
Nothing is explained too much, really, because The plague It is one of those films that defines its world through actions and the situations that its characters face.. The script of Vanicek and Florent Bernard It veils a state of sociocultural crisis through the contempt of the police – who, upon hearing the news of the plague, make the decision to close the entire building – towards that foreign community. A community that ends up involved in a carnage indebted to a certain B-class movie that pitted its protagonists against impossible creatures, but that represent much more than the monstrous. That “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” that the official motto of France proclaims would not be happening.
