Mark Reviews Movies: THE NIGHT EATS THE WORLD

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 12, 2018

The poor guy just wants to be alone at a loud party where he really doesn't know anyone. To be honest, he doesn't want to be there in the first place, since it's being held by his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend. She accidentally took some of his things when she moved out, and in a somewhat kind way, she has invited her ex in the hopes that the loner might meet some new people. Instead, he locks himself in the office of the apartment and falls asleep.

This turns out to be a blessing for Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie), because he misses the horror that unfolds inside the rest of the apartment. There's some commotion. We hear some screams, but Sam is blind and deaf to the world in his slumber. He awakens to discover that he got his wish: The party is finished, and he is quite, quite alone. The blood splattered on the walls and the floor is proof.

It's evidence of the old maxim: Be careful what you wish for. Near the start of The Night Eats the World, Sam seemingly finds himself in the position of the last living person in Paris. The occupants of the apartment, the building, the block, and, for all he knows, the city—maybe even the world—have died and been resurrected as savage, flesh-eating zombies.

From the shelter of the apartment, he watches as some neighbors across the street try to escape in a car, only to be overrun by a gang of the undead. In the apartment below, an old man and his wife have followed through on an apparent murder-suicide pact. Maybe if they had known they had a potential ally just upstairs, things would have turned out differently. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered, because Sam gets along quite well on his own. A pair of seniors might have gotten in the way of his newfound sense of complete solitude.

The film is a neat twist on the well-worn terrain of zombie stories, if only because it's about a character who has little to no interest in the concept of survival in numbers. Sam has the makings of one of those ancillary characters from any sort of post-apocalyptic fiction. You know the sort: the person whom our heroes encounter at some point on their journey, who has holed up in some sanctuary and survived on pure will, luck, or ruthlessness. Such a character is usually a lesson for the protagonists—that it's better to be with others when the world ends, that safety under such conditions is just an illusion, that insanity can strike anyone under the right circumstances.

That character is the hero here, though, and we see his journey toward potential madness play out with an approach of quiet intimacy. As one might expect, there's little dialogue in Jérémie Guez, Guillaume Lemans, and director Dominique Rocher's screenplay, since the story basically follows Sam as he makes a new, lonely life in the apartment. He doesn't even talk to himself as a means of explaining his plans and his thoughts to the audience. It's unnecessary, because Sam's thought process is all in Lie's performance and his planning is so effectively communicated by Rocher.

The first steps include Sam locking the front doors and exploring the other apartments, looking for food and supplies. There's a certain rigor to his technique—lining up and numbering the keys on the wall, marking zombie-infested apartments with an X, weighing and sealing any food that he finds while keeping a thorough inventory. Just about everything he needs or could want is in the building, and a shotgun that he finds in the downstairs neighbors' apartment gives him a little freedom to venture outside the building—but not too far. With Sam's basic survival needs met, the rest of the story, adapted from Pit Agarmen's novel, is about how the character deals with his utter solitude.

It's about routines, trying to break up those routines, and seeing how the momentary diversions become routines themselves. A drum kit in a teenager's bedroom offers some inspiration to create music. We don't learn much about Sam, except that he is a musician and that he has family about whom he's worried, but the film doesn't need a character with too much of a back story. The paradigm of what it means to be alive has shifted in this world, and Sam's experience is all about adapting to that. Lie's performance takes us through all of those steps and beyond, almost exclusively relying on conveying the character's inner-workings through looks and gestures.

Sam has a few visitors, most of them zombies—both real entities, attempting to claw and climb their way toward the noise that Sam makes, and nightmarish visions. One zombie, who was called Alfred (Denis Lavant) when he was alive, is trapped in the building's elevator, and Sam opens up to his undead acquaintance in a few scenes that force us to question his mental state and desire to be alone. A living companion named Sarah (Golshifteh Farahani) eventually arrives, and what happens within that situation raises even more questions about how far gone Sam has become.

The film's climactic sequence pits the hero against the zombies in a more direct way (Rocher stages the lengthy chase with a clever use of the levels of the buildings), and it's quite effective, because we're invested in this character's dilemma. This is fundamentally a familiar story of survival under extreme circumstances, but at its heart, The Night Eats the World is an evocative study of isolation and loneliness.

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