“Eat the Night” : Poggi’s and Vinel’s crude vision of a dying world
The countdown is on. At its end, total erasure. Not the end of the world, but almost: the Darknoon video game is living out its final days before the servers are disconnected. For Pablo and his sister Apo, several hundred hours entrusted to a territory are coming to an end. A window onto another world, soon to be closed forever. When he discovers the gameplay of this open world, Night, Pablo’s new companion, is astonished to realize it contains no rules or goals. Because in the outside world, the rules are obvious. It’s a corridor that leads its heroes to tragedy. Taken under his new lover’s wing, Pablo, alongside Night, sells on another dealer’s territory. There’s only room for one.
The spleen-drenched dark romanticism of the cursed children of an unfairly unloved first film (Jessica Forever) is here channeled into a rough and minimalist thriller, whose style, between refined classicism and experimentations of form, shines through. This unexpected combination of urban thriller and the lyricism we’ve come to expect from the duo creates a striking contrast. It gracefully brings out the poetry the two filmmakers are accustomed to.
Eat the Night is a masterfully crafted thriller that grips at the throat and guts, but it’s also a great film about the traumas of our times : the dreariness of the suburban middle class, the vertigo of Gen Z, haunted by the destruction of the environment, the difficulty of being in the world, of detaching oneself from the awful heaviness of reality by seeking paradises that are anything but artificial. Framed by this violence, the film strips away the indestructible structures of an all-devouring capitalism by imposing its rules of competitiveness in order to survive.
Marked for life by the brutality of the turn of the century, the film spits out the imagery of violence staged by modern terrorism – a frantic montage of beheadings in the video game evoking the macabre montages of ISIS, a rain of bodies reminiscent of those that had chosen to jump out their windows in the World Trade Center, a car mowing down a body. In this way, the video game is no longer simply a land of welcome, an asylum that embraces and embalms, but a direct continuation of reality. The two worlds respond to each other and converse, each invaded by their respective flow of images. So which world’s countdown is Eat the Night about?