Infested

It's just that I didn't realize he was in pain. When you suffer, you should say so. I can't do that stuff. You know what I'm like.

-- Kaleb

• The original French title is Vermines (ie. "Vermin"), and though it's probably Not That Deep I kept thinking of all the people crammed together in this rundown French apartment--mostly people of color and immigrants--who French society might think of as "vermin." (We Americans can feel that way.) Once people start dying, characters point out that the news isn't even covering it--one of the characters is a police officer, and someone says that if a cop dies people might pay attention to what's happening.

The protagonist, Kaleb, is a young man either in his late teens or early twenties who made money formerly by dealing drugs and now sells shoes. He lives with his sister Manon and their mother has died before the story starts.

• Kaleb loves exotic pets and has a room full of them, much to his sister's chagrin. (She keeps turning off the lights in his room to save money. On the one hand, the animals shouldn't have to suffer but on the other I couldn't help but agree with Manon.) Because of his youth and the nature of this movie, Kaleb does dumb things sometimes--especially buying a spider he knows nothing about and housing it with his other pets before he figures out where it will live.

(When it became clear that spiders were killing people, it took him a long time to admit that his spider could be responsible. But he eventually does try to make things right.)

In fact, I liked how the people in the apartment (forced often in a small, dirty space like the spiders forced into the air vents by poison) all cared for each other. At one point Kaleb accuses his sister of not caring about their neigbors even though the neighbors were friends with their mother and cared for them.