PopHorror Let's Get Scared
I’m always on the hunt for a new twist on the zombie genre. There’s only so much to be done with the undead, shambling shells of our former selves. One film on the Fantasia Film Festival circuit hopes to take up the challenge and make it less about the fight against the living and the dead or the living against the living, but more about a single man against his own mind and loneliness in a new film called La Nuit a Devore le Monde (The Night Eats the World).
Solitude can be nice. After the hustle and bustle of the day, sometimes there’s nothing better than to be alone in a room with a movie or a book or even to just listen to nothing but blissful silence. But what if that silence and solitude is all you have? It may drive you crazy and make the bleakness of the situation at hand even more hopeless. That is the tone for The Night Eats the World.
Directed by Dominique Rocher, this French film was penned by Pit Agarmen, Jeremie Guez, Guillaume Lemans, and Rocher. The story follows Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie), a man at a party in Paris who is just SO over it. He locks himself in a room of cassette tapes and falls asleep, and that is the last time anything was ever normal. Faint screams are the only indication that something is happening. Even though we don’t get to see the beginning of the end, doesn’t make how it was done any less effective. It was eerie because we knew what was happening, all while Sam was sleeping peacefully.
Sam is truly the ONLY person we see through the movie, but we do see appearances by Golshifteh Farahani, Denis Lavante, Sigrid Bouaziz and David Kemmenos. For the first time in a zombie film, we have a protagonist who is smart, slow and calculating. This movie isn’t a barnburner and sound means EVERYTHING. This is a very quiet film. Even the zombies are nearly silent, which was very unexpected but added a special element to the tone. There’s one scene when Sam is on the roof at night looking out across Paris and it is pitch black, no lights, no sounds and the Eiffel Tower is dark, and THAT is one of the most unsettling things in the movie, second only to the moment when the water stops. You truly feel the discomfort and panic of Sam through the movie, and his desire to find ANYTHING alive and not covered in blood.
Speaking of the zombies, as I watched their movement and how they hunt, they very much reminded me of the Infected and the Clickers in The Last of Us. Nearly silent, hunting by sound with jerky movements and FAST: they made the tension very high, even in the more quiet moments.
The audience will watch Sam survive as the days pass, and his mind and the solitude become his greatest enemy, even before running out of supplies and being attacked by zombies. In the end, it will force you to ask yourself one question: is the aftermath worth surviving the infection? This movie is a definite recommend. If you are looking for a zombie movie with brains, heart and an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness, then The Night Eats the World is a must-see. If you have some time, check out the Fantasia Fest 2018 award winners!
