The Night Eats the World AKA
La nuit a dévoré le monde
(2018) 93 min
Rated: TV-14 (Gore, implied cat death)
Country: France
Director: Dominique Rocher
Starring: Anders Danielsen Lie, Golshifteh Farahani, Denis Lavant
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★★☆☆
A man falls asleep and awakes to find the world has been taken over by zombies.
Synopsis:
A man named Sam (Lie) meets up with his ex-girlfriend at a house party. He wants to get hsi tapes back from her. She tells him to go to the empty room at the end of the hall and that she will meet up with him. He locks the door and falls asleep.
The next morning he finds blood smeared on the walls and a mess in the seemingly empty house. He cautiously walks around and finds a pair of women who try to attack him when they hear his voice. He escapes and looks out the window to see the streets of Paris littered and people running from vicious zombies.
Sam attempts to contact his girlfriend only to hear her cries of anguish as someone attacks her.
Sam resigns himself to cleaning up the apartment. As he scrubs the floor he hears noises beneath the floor and suddenly a gun goes off, blowing a hole through the floor. Sam peers into the hole to find an old man has committed suicide with a bullet through his head.
Sam widens the hole and climbs down to investigate the apartment. There he finds some food and he takes the shotgun from the old man’s corpse. He loads the gun with shells he finds and begins to explore the rest of the building cautiously.
He goes to the main floor and quietly closes he main doors to the building before any zombies outside notice him.
He starts to explore the office nearby while a zombie fruitlessly grasps through bars in an open window. He takes keys for the other apartments.
He gathers all the food and weapons he finds into a small pile, puts on a jacket and steels himself for clearing the building.
He tries unlocks the first floor apartment and gets attacked. He manages to fend off the zombie and afterwards marks a big X on the door to avoid ever entering that door.
He then grabs the keys for floors 2 and 3 and finds no one on the second floor. He rummages around, collecting food, finding a paintball gun and mask. He also happens to find a drum set in a boy’s room and plays it for fun.
Sam begins to realize that the drumming noise attracts a horde of zombies to the front of the apartment.
Sam starts to take the corpses of the suicide old couple and zippers them into sleeping bags. He places them on a bed and decorates them with photos of themselves, jewelry, etc. He then tapes the bedroom shut like a sealed tomb.
He has nightmares where the zombies enter his room while he sleeps in a surprise attack and start to eat him.
Sam has a zombie locked inside an elevator cage. In bouts of loneliness he talks to the zombie and names it Alfred. Sam feels that “dead is the new normal” and that as one of the living, he is not normal.
While paintballing zombies he sees a cat sneaking around in the street. Sam tries to coax it inside the building by opening a can of food, but the cat walks away. He ventures outside to look for it, but attracts the attention of zombies. They try to attack him but he escapes. He looks outside to see the cat standing next to a zombie and he shoots it (off screen).
Sam realizes he has blood on himself and cleans himself up with medical supplies. He looks at himself in a mirror waiting to see if he turns into a zombie. He waits with the end of a shotgun pointed under his neck. He falls asleep, the gun slips and goes off, waking him.
Sam starts to hear noises while in isolation. Soon seasons change and winter sets in. The food supply starts to dwindle. Even the zombies outside start to vanish and seem to leave.
Sam begins to taunt Alfred, the caged zombie in the elevator. He plays the drums loudly to attract the zombies in the neighborhood and yells at them.
One night while sleeping he hears a noise, and shoots at the wall. He walks over to the hole in the wall to find a girl wounded by his gun. Sam tries to help pull the fragments out of her stomach wound. The next day the girl wakes up and tells Sam that her name is Sarah (Farahani).
She says that she’s only met lone survivors like Sam and that her strategy is moving from rooftop to rooftop since the zombies aren’t good at navigating heights.
Sam goes to the flat with the large X on the door and shoots the zombies one by one. He manages to find food and returns to look for Sarah. She is on the rooftop. She talks to him about how she’s looking to keep moving and he doesn’t understand why she wants to leave and find a better place. He feels secure in where he is and doesn’t want to go anywhere. Sarah leaves the rooftop, frustrated.
Sam looks for Sarah and finds that she has been dead all along and stayed where he had left her after she was shot. All of their interactions were just hallucinations after that moment. Sam then covers the body and gives a moment of silence. He looks through her belongings and sees a camera. In it there’s a photo of him on the rooftop. He takes her grappling hook.
Sam sets fire to cassettes. He then frees Alfred. The fire sets off a fire alarm which attracts the zombies outside. They rush into the building and Sam fights a few off. He manages to sneak past them when smoke fills the building and they can’t see him. He reaches the roof and throws his grappling hook onto the roof of the next building.
He swings across and hits the building wall passing out. When he comes to, he climbs onto the roof and hears noises among the sea of Parisian rooftops. He is not alone. The film ends with him looking at the horizon.
Review:
The film begins as an interesting take on a somewhat tired genre. A man must survive in an urban environment. It could be compelling and for the first half of the film it is well done and engaging. Unfortunately, there isn’t much character growth or action and the film drags.
It is wonderfully shot and the lead, Anders Danielsen Lie, has the entire film riding on his acting capabilities. For the most part, he’s very good. It’s only that the writing lacks. We’re left with a character who is too afraid to move in a zombie apocalypse where those left alive must try to survive. This includes seeking out other life.
The score is fairly quiet for the most part and swells into vocal choruses that feel like a choir. The empty dirty streets of Paris remind me of the beginning of 28 Days Later.
Obviously a lot of work went into this film and it shows. This would have been a great film, if it just had a bit more urgency in it. A bit more building in the plot. Instead we’re left to waste away in a cage like Alfred the zombie.
This film is a soft recommend to those who want to see more foreign films. It’s slow and I personally wasn’t that engaged. If you’re more into a fast-paced zombie flick, this definitely won’t be for you.