Over more than half a century on the market, video games have achieved true cultural ubiquity — arguably more than narrative filmmaking in the current day. How wrong it is, then, that movies have largely continued to show gaming in a shallow, nonliteral manner, portrayed as thoughtless joy buzzers, rather than indicating how a title handles or commands attention. Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel don’t take such shortcuts with their thriller “Eat the Night.” Though the narrative spine is a turf war between small-time drug dealers, the Cannes-launched French feature searches for its big emotions in the digital realm, with long in-game sequences that follow a teenager compelled to escape the bleak world around her.
On the cusp of adulthood, the pale Apolline (Lila Gueneau) spends her days roaming the lands of “Darknoon,” a “World of Warcraft”-like massive multiplayer online sandbox. With her avatar’s oversized sword and comically skimpy battle armor, Apolline takes on one quest after another, rarely leaving the folds of her bedroom. Her gay older brother Pablo (Théo Cholbi) sometimes logs in to play too. When he goes to work, he hops on his too-flashy motorcycle to deal MDMA candies for cash. One day, Pablo recruits a young Black man named Night (Erwan Kepoa Falé) as a business partner and, soon after, the pair begin a tryst.
This early act of “Eat the Night” can seem plainly cosmetic. Falé and Cholbi find subtle notes to the pair’s interplay, but the actors don’t share the fiery chemistry to launch a passionate, doomed romance; their first kiss is a bit of a rushed surprise. Meanwhile, Apolline and Pablo’s home life isn’t fleshed out beyond a glum impression. (Their grump father, hooked up to an oxygen tank in another room, is mostly a structuring absence.) But interspersed through it all is the ticking clock of “Darknoon,” which is planning to shut down its servers after 20 years online. The world is about to end for Apolline, and that dread shades Pablo and Night’s own lives too.
It isn’t a mistake that the happenings inside “Darknoon” are largely more involving than the criminal eye-for-an-eye battle that engulfs Pablo and Night. There’s purpose to the contrast, but that doesn’t cover up some lulls. The film renews its dramatic confidence as “Darknoon” grows more central to the story, with Night joining the server in its final days to get closer to (but inadvertently catfish) an unknowing Apolline.
In a striking choice that bravely risks the uncanny valley, “Eat the Night” will occasionally swap the in-game avatars’ faces for more expressive, realistic features that resemble the actors’ own. It’s a stylistic risk well worth the reward. The uneasy marriage of the parallel worlds forges a novel aesthetic ground: one where muffled emotions can be fully clarified, not only to viewers but to the characters themselves.
Poggi and Vinel sharply employ the stylings and stalled physics of video games to plenty more melodramatic ends. A gory murder and snappy respawn serve as both a cathartic expression of rage and an off-beat joke. And a late scene, with avatars screaming and searching for one another among other players, brings grandeur to this story’s small-scale plight. After all, would Apolline ever leave the house to be in a crowd in the first place? More to the point, would an indie production like “Eat the Night” be able to afford hundreds of extras?
Even as the core narrative escalates to hardened violence, Poggi and Vinel are careful to maintain a certain delicacy (a fluttering score by electronic musician Ssaliva is a guiding force here). Their film is a cry for children left to their own devices — literally in the case of Apolline’s hulking Alienware gaming laptop. As Apolline puts it, “Darknoon” doesn’t really have an objective other than to “improve yourself,” so what becomes of someone when all their self-improvement is wiped away? Even through a thin plot, “Eat the Night” earns its noir stripes by staring into that abyss.
