Eat the Night, the second full-length feature from French filmmakers Caroline Poggu and Jonathan Vinel (2018's Jessica Forever), offers a portrait, by turns gritty and fantastical, of young working-class lives in a French port city.
For nearly a decade, Pablo (Night of the 12th's Théo Cholbi) and younger sister Apolline (appealing newcomer Lila Guineau), a high school student, have lived out their fantasies through massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Darknoon. In the game, they're buff warriors who can take on any challenger, but when Apo finds that it will be going dark on winter solstice, she finds herself at loose ends. Her brother and Darknoon are her whole world.
Pablo, however, has moved on, and not necessarily to better things. One morning, after driving Apo to school on his bright green motorbike, the low-level drug dealer meets Night (Erwan Kepoa Falé, who appeared with Cholbi in Ira Sachs' 2023 Passages), a grocery stocker who offers sympathy when rival dealers give him a beating.
Night, who is Black, lives with his older sister and her daughter. Deciding he could use a partner, Pablo, who is white, recruits Night to help him manufacture ecstasy. Soon enough, they're lovers as well as business associates, and the next several days are a blur of sex, dancing, and getting high, but their idyll comes to an end when Pablo foolishly roughs up one of his rivals. Apo also misses her brother, so while she plays Darknoon and draws pictures inspired by the game, his rivals plot to pay him back.
The siblings are largely on their own, since their unnamed father (Thierry Hancisse) spends much of his time on the road, and Poggu and Vinel draw a contrast between Apo, an introvert who channels her feelings of loneliness and isolation into a violent videogame, and Pablo, an extrovert who uses real-world violence to express his anger and defend his turf. It isn't clear what happened to their mother, but the loving, if irresponsible Pablo is more of a parental figure for Apo than their distant father.
When Pablo has to disappear for awhile, Night takes it upon himself to look in on Apo and avenge his lover. Though Apo rebuffs him at first, he bonds with her by way of his Darknoon avatar before she warms up to him in person, not least when he introduces her to the abandoned manor in which he, Pablo, and a (unavoidably symbolic) snake have been sqatting.
Unfortunately, violence begets violence in ways that have nothing to do with the game. If there's a lesson, it isn't that the game makes players violent, but the opposite, since Apo uses it to express frustration, while causing no harm outside of it, though the ending suggests she'll have engage with the outside world to avoid becoming like her violence-prone brother.
The parts of the film, which range from the grittiness of the provincial environment to the vibrant stylization of the game, don't always fit together as well as they should, though the avatars become more realistic with time, but the primary actors are engaging, and Eat the Night shows a side of multicultural, working-class France not always represented in French cinema.
What kind of film collection would this title be suitable for?
The second and highest-profile feature to date from French filmmakers Caroline Poggu and Jonathan Vinel belongs in LGBTQ+, Thriller, Romance, Drama, and World Cinema collections in academic and public libraries.
What kind of film series would this narrative fit in?
Eat the Night would make for an exciting addition to a film series focused on protagonists who use virtual reality to cope with impossible situations, like Benjamin Ree's The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a 2024 documentary about Mats Steen, a young Norwegian man with a degenerative disease who found both friends and freedom through World of Warcraft.