EAT THE NIGHT

(After being nominated for the Queer Palm at the 2024 Director’s Fortnight program at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s film Eat the Night is now streaming. Bears Rebecca Fonté has this review. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)

For years millions of people have found connection online through MMOs [Massively multiplayer online game, for the uninitiated]. The most famous of them is World of Warcraft, which at one point in time had 12 million subscribers. MMOs allow a player many benefits that other games can only rarely replicate. For example, there are highly customizable avatars that players can control, affording them a chance to redesign themselves. Players often forge relationships with players from around the world, making friends and interacting with cultures that they would never be exposed to in their home city. There’s an element of role play to these games, more than just how you play the game, but the way you interact with other players. A shy player can craft new identity, role play that person, and meet new friends without ever leaving their home or pick the right outfit, have expensive enough shoes, forget about body image issues, whatever might be holding them back. MMOs can serve as social meeting places, sometimes people can meet up in a game and just sit under a tree and talk.

For people who don’t game, these sort of friendships seem unreal, but for gamers, who are spending time in this world and build relationships by working together and celebrating together. The game becomes social capital, something of tangible value to the players, be it goodwill, fellowship, mutual sympathy, social intercourse, all of which goes to the improvement of living conditions for the whole community as well. Social capital is the theory that dates back to 1916, one of the first instances being a school district. In Eat the Night, a film by Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel (Jessica Forever), that social capital comes from Darknoon, an MMO invented by the directors and their team to serve as the landscape for Apolline (Lila Gueneau) to find peace in an otherwise chaotic world. It is in Darknoon where she has forged her relationship with her brother Pablo (Théo Cholbi), and avoids the emptiness of her own home. For Apo, when an announcement comes down that the MMO will shut down in 60 days, she feels like her world is crashing down on her.

However for Pablo, the world is just beginning. Taking on a partner to expand his highly lucrative one-man drug dealing operation, he also finds love. Night (Erwan Kepoa Falé) is someone from the real world. He has a job and a sister with a child that he babysits. He buys adult clothes and has adult concerns when he joins up with Pablo. When he plays at drug dealing, it’s much like the way Apo plays at Darknoon. You meet people for small interactions, you gain experience, and you can never die. That last one is the hard part. Pablo and Night end up in a turf war with a gang and suddenly there seems to be a ticking clock on their world as well.

Apo dislikes Night out of jealousy, but after Pablo [spoilers now] ends up in jail, it’s him she turns to for connection, both in the real world, and unknowingly in Darknoon. As Night joins the game in secret to watch over his lover’s sister, just days before the game shuts down, he too can see the lure of this designed and moderated. He is able to connect with Apo in a way he never could in real life. The metaphor runs through the whole film right up to the very end, which i refuse to spoil, and holds these three disparate characters the other In a way that’s both entirely original and beautifully executed.

All three actors give stunning performances, and the doom overtakes the film much like a Shakespearean tragedy. When the opening scene of the movie tells you the world is ending in 60 days, you have to know you’re in for drama and possibly tears. Anyone who has a sibling that they feel more connected to than their parents we’ll get a lot out of Eat the Night, and no shit, I literally just made the connection on the title as I typed it.

Shout out for sure to the game’s Co-designers Saradibiza and Lucien Krampf, and the Director of Photography Raphaël Vandenbussche. Because I’m unable to identify what’s a digital effects inside the game and what was shot to look like it does in the game, I’m just going to give everyone credit. I think my favorite moments are when the chosen avatars of the players start to look more and more like the actual player and engage in dialogue. These, of course, are Moments the players are moving from one world into another, or allowing the real world to effect their own gameplay. The true triumph is the way the directors have been able to bridge those two worlds until such a singular story.

– Bears Rebecca Fonté

Liked it? Take a second to support Hammer to Nail on Patreon!