Eat The Night is a sombre yet propulsive look at conflict, connection, and love through the intersection of the real and virtual worlds. Co-directors Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s second feature juxtaposes a small-time turf war turned queer love story against two siblings who share an obsession with an online video game known as ‘Darknoon’. While strange and often miserable, the film is a fascinating, captivating and timely thriller investigating the struggle for human interaction in an increasingly digital and economically unequal world.
The film begins with the perspective of an online role-playing game. Darknoon’s loading screen is essentially a substitute for World of Warcraft. When it loads, the camera cuts to an exterior shot of the house of teenager Apoline (Lila Gueneau), as if the operating system is bringing her ‘reality’ online. While sitting alone in her dimly lit room in Le Havre, a montage plays out where she peacefully becomes engrossed in her avatar and her fantasy environment, in which she has escaped for nearly a decade. She shares this experience with her brother Pablo (Théo Cholbi). For the siblings, “Darknoon has always been there”. Apoline narrates that their memories, pleasure and pain make a world “more home than their hometown”. A videogame has predominantly shaped their upbringing.
Shattering both siblings’ realities is a pop-up message Apoline receives while playing: “At midnight on the winter solstice, the servers will be shut down forever”. A countdown begins in both the film and the game as the servers slowly go offline, provoking a sense of encroaching metaphorical and physical doom. Apoline contends with accepting the new normal, playing Darknoon senselessly and without any direction. Meanwhile, Pablo begins to spend more time in his side hustle as a drug dealer, which sows resentment in Apoline as he moves away from the game. His actions become reckless and dangerous, leading to him getting beaten up by a rival drug-dealing gang for often being antagonistic. Enter the empathetic Night (Erwan Kepoa Falé), a bystander who witnesses Pablo’s abuse and attempts to help, bonding over a shared cigarette.
As Pablo embroils Night in his drug making and dealing escapades, they develop a hedonistic, lustful and intense relationship. Crime, passion, and collaboration clash as the film constantly shuffles between sex and narcotics over an eerie, electropunk score. The ever-growing, ever more volatile turf war with a rival gang becomes a striking contrast to Apoline’s existence as she further isolates herself in her now-decaying virtual reality.
Disparities between the once co-dependent duo become apparent. Apoline cosplays as her favourite character from Darknoon while Pablo beats up a thug with a taser. As things escalate in Pablo’s material world, and by extension Apoline’s, darkness, violence, and isolation creep in as the search for stability and connection becomes increasingly fraught.
Eat the Night is most effective when it focuses on the tragic shifting of Pablo and Apoline’s familial bond. Apoline cares deeply for her brother; she awaits his return, patches his wounds, and loves her Darknoon partner. Even when Pablo spends more time with Night, he still loves his sister – buying her a more powerful laptop and sending Night to check in on her when he gets cornered by the law. While the crime elements cascade into more unfocused subplots, the virtual space their well-developed relationship has formed from is relatable and applicable to how people use the internet today.
Lila Gueneau and Théo Cholbi’s performances perfectly express the joy yet toxic obsession when spending so much time in a digital space. Apoline’s mental health is now dependent on Darknoon as a crutch, just as Pablo is a man who lives in an explosive, perpetual motion when he’s not playing the game. By filming certain sections entirely in the video game world, Eat the Night creates a stylistic representation of how human interaction is more amorphous in an attention economy that commodifies and profits off such connections.
The allure and addiction of virtual spaces express themselves through their virtues and flaws. There is dread as the countdown ticks down, but there is also life. Apoline finds beauty in the digitised landscapes, always seeking and finding something new. She celebrated her twelfth birthday inside the game. The balance between the real and the fictional becomes the game and the biggest hook of the film. The cinematography by Raphaël Vandenbussche is perpetually dark, soaked in a murky blue hue. This colour envelops Pablo and Night’s escapades as a contrast to the warmer hues in Darknoon. As an examination of reality, the film’s craft strengthens the thematic intensity.
Eat the Night is an engaging experiment whose bleakness and final message may weigh down the viewer with its miserabilism. Still, it is a handsomely made reminder that relationships can equally flourish and wither in both the real and the digital world. Eat the Night is a cautionary tale about addiction, crime and love that morally and emotionally exhausts as much as it enthrals.
