EAT THE NIGHT: A Clumsy but Emotionally Resonant Gamer Thriller

Roger Ebert famously declared that video games were not art, an opinion that feels pretty outdated especially with the advent of games like Bioshock, Death Stranding, Elden Ring etc being written and discussed about – convincingly I might add – through artistic lenses. However, when it comes to the MMORPG video game at the center of the French thriller film Eat the Night – called “DarkNoon” – he may still have a point in many cases.

Video games within movies to me have always had a jarring effect that contrasts them in such a stark way from the movies they inhabit that it does, however pretentious this might sound, feel like an aggressively inferior form of media. The movements, the graphical representations, the gaudy colors, the ultra-smooth corners give video games, especially when contrasted with cinema, a lifeless sterile feeling.

Two Types of Addiction

Eat the Night centers on a young teenager named Apolline (Lila Gueneau) who is obsessed with the videogame DarkNoon and also her own created character within it. She even has a fully-realized cosplay of the character which she acts out time to time. Her brother Pablo (Théo Colbi) used to be her gamer companion, but he is now often away doing drug deals and handing out with his new boyfriend Night (Erwan Kepoa Falé). The film intertwines these two stories in a way that initially feels like an incongruous and frankly undercutting style that saps the potency of both, but they coalesce surprisingly well as the film goes on. This is one of the rare films that finds it footing much later in its narrative. Once directors Caroline Poggi and

Jonathan Vinel lean into the bleakness of of their two main subjects – video game addiction and drugs – they create a narrative that allows their characters to feel the tragic wrath of the endgame they all take head-on.

Lacking in Character

Pablo is absent for part of the story when he gets set up and busted for dealing drugs to minor. His absence unfortunately results in the weakest part of the film because his character is the only one with a clear dynamism that tussles between domestic and renegade lifestyle.

The other two characters, Apolline and Night, are much more one-note, having almost no conflict among each other and spending their screen time essentially nodding at each other’s thoughts. Pablo is the one who introduces chaos and doubt and once he gets out of jail, his unleash of vengeance provides the perfect denouement to the film. It turns even the video-game portion, which for most of the film serves as not more than passive whimsy at best, ugly and boring time-filler as worst, into an emotionally resonant sequence.

Conclusion

The effects of the game are turned from being tawdry graphical representations of fantasy into being ciphers for real people as Pablo’s character from the game disappears abruptly and melts into the façade. The symbolism here may be a bit heavy-handed and obvious but considering the main girl character of the film for who this is most emotionally resonant, is a teenager, it by association renders the moment poignant and emotionally resonant. In the end Eat the Night manages to make myself, a video-game skeptic, more of a believer of its affecting power.

Eat the Night released in theaters in U.S. on January 27th.