The Night Eats The World review: Based on the novel by Pit Agarmen, this psycho drama reminds us that the Zombie genre can still feel fresh long after it was first thought to have staled.
The Night Eats the World review by Abi Silverthorne.
The Night Eats the World Review
The Night Eats the World (owner of the most poetically scintillating title of Frightfest) starts as a testament to social awkwardness. Musician Sam has come to a cramped apartment party in Paris to retrieve his tapes from busy ex Fanny (Sigrid Bouaziz), but after an altercation with her drunk boyfriend swiftly escapes to a dark little room at the back of the flat to avoid the revellers and his own palpable awkwardness.
In many ways a house party is the most genius setting for a zombie apocalypse. These are houses of horror for the shy and sober like Sam — sometimes a breeding ground of dissociation, irrationality, rage and accidents. What better place for monstrous transformation where inebriation already does half the job for us, stripping us of steady thought, of coordination. Turning familiar faces into something we do not recognise, then towards the listless, red-eyed, anchor-footed ennui of post-party comedown. The joke has always been there, the drunk stumbling home, “he was walking like a…” Like a what? Like a a zombie, of course. The image seems so perfect it is like it was always there, at the corner of our collective subconscious.
The party is already a haunted place for Sam: bodies rattling a bathroom door and making him startle, young women paralysed by drink, pale and taut in the corner (or perhaps, already at the first stage of whatever infection will start the zombie mania) and glimpses of wretched bodies coiled around toilet bowls, hacking.
Eventually Rocher, with perfectly calculated tension, executes the literal horror with the first wave of zombie attacks —conducted with muffled screaming and banging, barely audible on the other side of the locked door where Sam dozes.
The Night Eats the World Review
When he wakes, the apartment is empty but trashed, the walls splattered with blood, and the hungry remains of his Ex scrabbling up the stairs towards him before he locks her out and begins his new life, alone, at the top of the building rise of Paris, surrounded by the undead above and below.
The film does us the favour of sparing the exposition, they know we know this dystopia, and we recognise these monsters, we have seen them a hundred times over on screen. Instead it focuses on the involving loneliness of the journey of our reluctant hero Sam. He wanted to be alone all night, and now he has wish and no idea how to survive with its terrible blessing.
“Dead is the norm now, I’m the one who’s not normal”, Sam says at one point to his resident Zombie, posthumously named Alfred (Denis Lavant on stunning, subtle form), an older doctor who Sam has trapped in an elevator and sometimes sits and watches gnaw at the metal bars for company. But, the film suggests, did he not always feel that way, not normal? One wonders if the bloody horror around him is just a realisation of what moving through the world, feeling different, and feeling anxious, always was to him.
Later on, Sam will linger at the window of the apartment block and envision himself, in his coat and boots, stood in the middle of the wreckage of the streets below, looking back at himself. But he will not go out, only imagine it. To anyone with social anxiety, they will not need to picture a zombie population in the city to feel that simultaneous weight of claustrophobia and terror of the outside. They will know it well.
The Night Eats the World Review
Often the most interesting parts of zombie films are actually the minutia of events that happen when the heroes aren’t battling the undead hand to hand. Those gentler moments of reflection and even boredom in a world that is no longer your own – being a habitant of the inhabitable. This film favours that (and is a superior example of it). Sam barely leaves the apartment block, foraging for food in strangers cupboards, and marking the rooms where the families within still roam as monsters with white crosses for no go. Because of this closed up narrative everything that happens inside is more intense and pulse-raising for it, even the creak of weight on the floorboards above, or the milky, dead eye of Alfred watching through the elevator slats.
But fans of the genre for its spine tingling scenes of bloody chase and attack will not be left wanting, either. Sam can see everything from the top, from botched escapes to cannibalism in the windows across the street. The coy, voyeuristic nature of those glimpses of a Paris run wild is mesmerising. The protagonist is within but still very much outside of the chaos. One scene near the start involving a family trying to get away by car is particularly effective. Rocher’s direction of the many, many death scenes are deliberately partial: leaving enough to the imagination that our own minds work in conjunction with the limited effects to create a spectacle of “wouldn’t it be awful’ imaginings.
Anders Danielson Lie is excellent as Sam, pulling off the increasing insanity of a man in his situation convincingly and lending a gut wrenching be-wilderness to heartfelt scenes where the dark, dreadful details — bodies of wives stashed under rugs, the sound of a little boy’s voice on his abandoned tape recorder — of the fate of the world become clear. To discuss one of his only co-stars Golshifteh Farahani too much would spoil one of the films’ great twists, but rest assured her character and performance adds something wonderful to the proceedings.
Although the acting, the scary set-pieces and even David Gubitsch haunting score elevate a standard story of destruction and survival, it is the story of Sam that makes it so stirring and original. He remains an unlikely, strange hero; a young man who shakes hands with zombies and makes music with the odd things he can find from dead people’s rooms. Only someone who already feared the world so much – who needed it to end before he could stop being scared, could fascinate us so much. Sometimes, as Sam concludes, it’s only the footsteps of something worse behind us that push us to step outside.
Bleak but full of beauty, relatable and repugnant, The Night Eats the World is a remarkable film; a profound look at the ability of humanity to remain through the longest of darkness. For a film so filled with corpses, this one’s pulse beats strong and true.
The Night Eats the World review by Abi Silverthorne, August 2018.
The Night Eats the World screened as part of Arrow Video Frightfest 2018. It will be available to buy via Signature’s Frightfest Presents line from October 2018.
