The Night Eats the World is a 2018 horror film about the morning after a party where a young man wakes up to find Paris overrun by zombies.
What’s to be done with the zombie obsession that continues to sweep world-wide pop culture, their prevalence in entertainment unbelievably still somehow sustainable after what really amounts to decades of rehashed stories on a singular premise. While innovation in the genre rarely finds any light, occasionally, something comes along that doesn’t try so much to tamper with the formula but rather make the experience orbiting it more cerebral. Think of Danny Boyle‘s 28 Days Later or Edgar Wright‘s Shaun of the Dead, films that put the weight on the characters instead of the monsters.
Now comes Dominique Rocher‘s chilling psychological horror drama The Night Eats the World, a frightfully creative take on the old yarn that has much more to do with the devastating effects of isolation than the imminent threat of being chomped. The story is descriptively simple: A young man named Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie) arrives at a house party in Paris, looking to collect some things from his ex-girlfriend. Not wanting to be there, and sort of abandoned in the fray of partygoers, he steals his way to a small back room and falls asleep. When he wakes the following morning, he finds the apartment strewn in blood and his ex-girlfriend savagely on the hunt. Making it to safety again, he sees out the window the city, too, has become a madhouse with nearly everyone turned into a zombie. Getting himself to a downstairs two story flat, he barricades himself inside to wait out the apocalypse, only to find that maybe that day will never come.
Sam is no hero, a shy, quiet man with an anger inside, that finds himself in an impossible nightmare, cast into the darkness of solitude simple because he has no want to be part of his ex-girlfriend’s party lifestyle. He then takes to his new home, a self-made prison, dealing with sudden new hurdles, including starvation and aching loneliness. A keen-eyed viewer will probably begin to connect some dots between this and Richard Matheson‘s highly-influential sci-fi masterpiece I Am Legend, even as there is plenty to keep them separate. Themes of heartbreaking depression and an an almost feral need for human contact link them.
Kudos goes to Danielsen Lie who is on screen for nearly every frame of the film, most of it dialogue-free, trying to cope with the slow deterioration of his mental and physical state. It’s a chilling performance, transformative as he becomes emaciated – literally and metaphorically – in his house of personal horror.
Rocher isn’t looking to redefine the genre, but instead layer it in more emotional impact, stripping away the tropes of a field of survivors steadily getting picked off. He uses plenty that’s familiar yet manages to generate some truly harrowing moments of suspense (especially a terrific opening), cleverly avoiding the guts and gore so common in these films. There are two things that really push this to surprising yet subtle heights of inspiration, with a zombie named “Alfred” (Denis Lavant) trapped in the apartment’s cage door elevator, who says not a single word but offers remarkable hints of awareness behind his manic eyes, and the film’s wonderful use of music, both on the score (by David Gubitsch) and produced by Sam from makeshift instruments. It’s great stuff.
For fans of action-oriented zombie movies, The Night Eats the World will be a letdown. No doubt. There are long moments of stillness compressed by jarring swells of terror. This is a human drama, built around a false hope of freedom, and it’s going divide its audience, especially as the film progresses and the twists begin. If you’re looking for a more meaningful zombie experience, then this is where to start, but if you after more traditional chase and chomp, perhaps look elsewhere.