Film Review: The Night Eats The World

The Night Eats The World
Director: Dominique Rocher
Haut et Court, WTFilms
Released: 01.13.18

I don’t give a fuck how posh or sophisticated of a cinephile you think you are—if a zombie flick is playing, you’re going to sit down and gander. When George A. Romero fastened the 1968 Night of The Living Dead on a shoestring budget in rural Pennsylvania, I bet he wasn’t expecting that type of infectious disease to take over the entire world. Some say the zombie genre has aged as elegantly as left-out 1% milk, but when one rotting corpse shambles lifelessly to the floor, there’s bound to be another one ready to blindside a thought-to-be disinterested audience. There has been a horde of brain-gorging variants in the last half century—the old-fashion, slow-moving hazards in The Walking Dead, the almost-athletic track runners in 28 Days Later, the Killdozer behemoths from Left 4 Dead, even the experimental fungal spore hosts from The Last of Us. However you pick your favorable undead, the content keeps coming. So when a French take on the genre, The Night Eats The World or La nuit a dévoré le monde, got caught in my crosshairs, you could say I took a shot at it. Maybe it’s because I have a weird obsession with apocalyptic fiction, but that’s besides the point…

We’re thrown into the story of the pending doom of Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie, 22 July), an emotionally-damaged musician living in Paris whose failed relationship left him with existential dread for the future. When his ex-girlfriend Fanny (Sigrid Bouaziz, Personal Shopper) accidentally packs up all his cassettes and music during the move, Sam has to retrieve his stuff during a rowdy housewarming party. Things only go from bad to total shitstorm when he wakes up the next morning to find “The City of Light” is swarming with a flesh-eating plague, turning its population into mindless, teeth-clacking cannibals. It’s up to Sam to use his creative wits and all available resources to fortify the Paris loft into a self-sustaining sanctuary to survive the constant threat of being eaten alive. 

Like most self-discoveries, I found this movie during the height of the 2020 COVID pandemic, where most of us were probably worrying about humanity’s extinction. Although my binge-watching of such brutality could easily run its course on the subject matter, expecting the debilitated metropolitan areas and deafening moans from reanimated corpses from below, The Night Eats The World brought something different. The movie is relatively quiet—nearly no dialogue and any music is played through headphones or muffled boomboxes from side rooms. This eldritch silence keeps viewers on-edge, only to attack you with ongoing sounds and mutters throughout the apartment building as if it was a breathing character itself. Every floorboard cracking. Every bit of plumbing groaning for running water that has seized arrival. Every thud, trickle and pound drives a dagger into the viewer’s eardrum. 

Now, past screenings of previous zombie flicks bring buckets of blood and entrails flung on the walls and ceilings of some claustrophobic haunt-zone alleyway. However, not only is this movie pretty spotless, it’s almost avant-garde in its design. Sam’s shelter is a six-story rustic apartment, which is nearly transformed into a cross-breed of a contemporary art exhibit and brought-to-life passages from interior magazine Apartamento. There’s a sleek, totality presence to the absolute horror of isolation that makes it otherworldly. From makeshift stick-and-poke tallying as a calendar on the scummy windows, to every spherical container based on the roof to collect rainwater—it’s a niche detail that makes anyone’s imagination run wild. There’s even a short segment where Sam (months into the end of the world) tickers with found objects to create a clambering orchestrated installation. It’s obvious Sam is losing his goddamn mind, but it makes me want to be a part of it! If Mad Max glamorized the bruting industrial gas-punk aesthetic of chrome and desert, while Waterworld splashed nautical, do I say “oceanic bioshock” with hues of oxidized copper greens, then this movie paints quarantine as a safe space.

The Night Eats The World is the type of movie that came out at the wrong time in the right place. The zombie hype died when we graduated high school, only to get double-tapped to oblivion by the Zombieland sequel and the never-ending spinoffs of the TWD universe. Plus, being a European film may stray most of our American audience away. However, those willing to revisit the genre might find this as a top ranking “Zombie Killer of the Week.” The Night Eats The World is a modern day classic, perfect for the autumn season. So scavenge what you can, grab the heaviest blunt instrument and head out for some cranium-cracking entertainment. –Alton Barnhart 

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