Thibault Emin’s thriller sees a new couple forced to barricade themselves in an apartment amid an outbreak in which the infected merge with their physical surroundings

Heavily fermented films born from Covid claustrophobia are still coming out of the woodwork – quite literally in the case of this visually arresting Gallic number, in which two shut-ins find themselves under attack by an entity that has grown out of the wooden slats with which one of them has barricaded the apartment windows. This isn’t your average pandemic thriller; here, the infected meld with inorganic material in their surroundings, until their outward contours and their personhood are gone.

Thibault Emin’s film starts with a little whiff of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen. After their one-night stand, hypochondriac Anx (Matthieu Sampeur) and impertinent Cass (Edith Proust) find themselves bunkered up in one corner of a madcap apartment block. They banter with the other residents – gruff Mr Mouaki (Toni d’Antonio) and his family, an enigmatic Japanese tenant (Lika Minamoto) holed up with her dog – down the waste-disposal chutes. Observing the unfolding martial-law response over the internet, they feel safely cocooned, until Cass notices a strange accumulation of pebbles underneath Anx’s furniture.