Video games exchange carpe diem realism for escape.
The French video-game movie Eat the Night is no empty-headed MCU prank, it probes how digital technology has failed our spiritual needs. Apolline (Lila Gueneau), a 17-year-old, alienated drop-out, is devoted to the gothic, futuristic video game Darknoon, which is scheduled to permanently shut down on Christmas. This abandonment will further distance the girl, whose main human connection is with her older brother, Pablo (Théo Cholbi), a similarly disaffected drug dealer. Their interdependence and estrangement are conveyed through shifts from digital-fantasy imagery to realism, both illustrating the emotional impact of opposing dreamlike or conscious perceptions. It’s a genuine aesthetic breakthrough by the directing duo Caroline Poggi and Jonathon Vinel.
Eat the Night offers the insight that Steven Spielberg couldn’t achieve in Ready Player One. which was caught up in Hollywood’s faddish technological and narrative exploitation. Poggi and Vinel, both in their late 30s, refuse the falsehoods of pop-culture delusion. Their title suggests a sophisticated, Millennial version of Saul Bellow’s once-renowned short story “Seize the Day” (1956), flipping the Latin motto carpe diem so that Eat the Night addresses the nihilism that has befallen the Millennial generation, plus their spiritual hunger.
Apo and Pablo represent the peer group that has grown up with what’s called MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) — the video-game format that involves numerous simultaneous role players who interact but remain strangers. This platform would be ineffective if not for its emphasis on violence. Apo brags about “Killing 100 figures a day, 1,000 on a busy night — destiny achieved.” Poggi and Vinel then show us a lonely girl sitting at her laptop console.
Apo and Pablo resemble introspective kids on the spectrum; their seething, internalized violence comes out in video-game activity until Pablo, after being attacked by a rival drug gang, meets Night (Erwan Kepoa Falé), a smiley yet isolated black youth who becomes his partner-dealer and lover. Their paired entrepreneurship (cranking out red, triangular MDMA Ecstasy pills from a recipe found on the dark web) distills the twisted industry of the age.
Their generation’s sense of empathy misunderstands compassion. Video games elicit more adventure and excitement than the confusions of life — but Pablo and Night’s sexual connection shows confusion entering their game world, too. The Ecstasy drug, a hallucinogenic stimulant, shapes the distortion of time and perception that ruins these three lives. Night relates their circumstance to a snake caged in a terrarium. Poggi and Vinel realize how the millennium’s godless environment distorts humanity — the crisis that politicians blame on TikTok and overdependence on cellphones.
But Eat the Night is more profound than Hollywood’s exploitative social justice dramas (Breaking Bad, Euphoria) largely because Poggi and Vinel account for the aesthetic and moral fascination hidden within technological novelty. Eat the Night transcends cheap moralizing — Night himself (who plays video games with his niece) is subject to the social corruption that Apo and Pablo reject. His tragedy is what Spielberg missed in Ready Player One. These three youths share goofy, creepy smiles among themselves, made meaningful when the directors cross-cut flash-forwards of domestic life, game life, gang life, and lonely life. Many reviewers misread the family-life contrast of gang rival Louis (Mathieu Perotto) and his dying father, missing the poignant irony of isolates at odds with each other.
Note that when forlorn lover Night catfishes lonesome Apo, the film finds a scary new level of social sympathy. Falé’s Night redeems the black archetype that Isaach de Bankolé once represented (until The Brutalist played out his distinction). Not simply an Other, Falé/Night reveals the common sensitivity and fear of all inexperienced youth. Poggi and Vinel’s deep look into tech-age desperation occasions the film’s most extraordinary special effect: As their dilemmas and the end of Darknoon converge, each character’s game avatar takes on the realistic facial expressions of the actors themselves. It powerfully depicts how video-digital technology distances, isolates, and negates connection — the cycle of insensitivity when violence and revenge become the only outlet that a deprived generation can conceive. (The Darknoon sequences resemble the ultra-vivid game and graphic-comic world of Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, creating a gulf between imagination and reality that is staggeringly poignant.)
After Darknoon’s apocalypse, Eat the Night’s high point shows Apo, Pablo, and Night reaching out to each other, just like the epic Children of Paradise. Few Millennials will know that classic of cinema’s golden age, but Poggi and Vinel make it possible for them to experience that same longing in modern terms. That makes Eat the Night special among Millennial movies.