In more than half a century of their existence on the market, video games have achieved true cultural ubiquity, arguably more so than the feature film industry today. How wrong, then, that movies largely continue to present games in a shallow, non-literal way, portraying them as mindless whistles of joy, rather than pointing out how the title handles or attracts attention. Carolyn Poje and Jonathan Fennell take no such shortcuts in their thriller “Eat the Night.” Although its narrative backbone is a turf war between small-time drug dealers, the Cannes-released French film finds its big emotions in the digital world, with long in-game sequences following a teenager forced to escape the bleak world around her.
On the cusp of adulthood, pale Apolline (Lila Gino) spends her days wandering the lands of Darknoon, a massively multiplayer online game similar to World of Warcraft. With her massive symbolic sword and comical battle armor, Appoline takes on one task after another, rarely leaving the folds of her bedroom. Sometimes her gay older brother Pablo (Theo Cholpi) signs in to play as well. When he goes to work, he rides his flashy motorcycle to trade MDMA candy for money. One day, Pablo recruits a young black man named Nate (Erwan Kiboa Vale) as a business partner, and soon after, the duo begins an experiment.
This early work of “Eat the Night” can seem distinctly cosmetic. Vali and Cholpi find subtle notes in their interaction, but the actors don’t share the fiery chemistry to start a passionate, doomed romance; Their first kiss was a rushed surprise. Meanwhile, Apolline and Pablo’s home life does not materialize beyond a bleak impression. (Their angry father, attached to an oxygen tank in another room, is often a structural absence.) But punctuated by the ticking clock of Darknoon, which plans to shut down its servers after 20 years online. The world is about to end for Apolline, and this horror casts a shadow over the lives of Pablo and Nate as well.
It’s no mistake that the events within “Darknoon” are vastly more exciting than the gripping criminal tit-for-tat battle between Pablo and Knight. There is a purpose to this discrepancy, but that does not cover some quiet periods. The film renews its dramatic confidence as “Darknoon” becomes more prominent in the story, with Night joining the Servant in his final days to get closer to the unknown (but unwitting) Appoline.
In a stunning choice that bravely ventures into the uncanny valley, Eat the Night will occasionally swap out the faces of in-game avatars with more expressive, realistic features that resemble the actors’ faces. It’s a stylistic risk worth the reward. The uneasy marriage between parallel worlds constitutes a new aesthetic ground: where repressed emotions can be made more fully clear, not only to viewers but also to the characters themselves.
Poggi and Vinyl makes sharp use of the stunted techniques and physics of video games to achieve more melodramatic endings. A bloody murder and a quick return are both a mild expression of anger and an off-putting joke. And a late scene, where the avatars scream and search for each other among the other players, adds grandeur to the plight of this small-scale story. After all, would Appoline leave the house to be in a crowd in the first place? More importantly, would an independent production like “Eat the Night” be able to provide hundreds of extras?
Even as the basic narrative escalates into extreme violence, Boogie and Vinyl are careful to maintain a certain tenderness (the fluttering electronic music of electronic musician Ssaliva is the guiding force here). Their film is a cry for kids left to their own devices — literally in the case of Apolline’s massive gaming laptop. As Appoline says, “Darknoon” has no purpose other than “to improve yourself,” so what happens to someone when all their self-improvement is erased? Even with a weak plot, “Eat the Night” earns its black streaks by staring into that abyss.