EAT THE NIGHT Review: Virtual Reality Meets Gritty Crime Film

Near the end of Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s (Jessica Forever) initially promising, ultimately disappointing feature-length film, Eat the Night, a virtual screen within a screen — an MMORPG (massive multiplayer role-playing game) — hundreds, if not thousands, of digital avatars fall from a virtual sky, their virtual lives permanently extinguished as the game’s servers shut down, casualties of dwindling interest and ruthless, profit-oriented corporate decision making. 

 

The images of lifeless avatars and a blank screen also signal not just the end of the game that connects Pablo (Théo Cholbi), a disaffected, low-level drug dealer, and his younger, teenaged sister, Apolline (Lila Gueneau), but also the end of a chapter in their respective lives. For Pablo, always recklessly, thoughtlessly looking forward, the end of the game, Darknoon, signifies a new beginning, possibly one without his younger sister. For Apolline, Darknoon's permanent shutdown simplistically symbolizes the end of a troubled, isolated childhood and the early, wrenching onset of an unwanted, unavoidable adulthood. 

 

Poggi and Vinel, however, aren’t content to explore the virtual/offline lives of its two protagonists, the economic conditions that lead Pablo into a dangerous, potentially fatal profession, or Apolline’s seemingly extreme alienation from her offline life, or even the frequently absent father whose disappearances and reappearance remain unexplained. Instead, they plunge Pablo into painfully predictable crime-drama territory (a local gang who resent Pablo encroaching on their territory), romantically and professionally partner Pablo with Night (Erwan Kepoa Falé), and leave Apolline either offscreen or peering at her computer screen, slicing, dicing, and otherwise slashing gorily through online foes. 

 

Even after Apolline inadvertently connects with Night onscreen, mediating her insecurities, anxieties, and resentment of his presence in Pablo’s life, she remains an intensely vague, ill-defined character, a cypher used primarily as a distraction from the inevitable resolution of Pablo — and later Night’s — conflict with the equally under-rendered gang. Most aren’t even named.

 

One, the likely leader, repeatedly visits an older man confined to a sickbed. Whether there’s a biological connection between the two men or simply a professional one, albeit with a personal connection, remains, like so many obvious questions in Eat the Night, stubbornly unanswered. 

 

Splitting Eat the Night in three, sometimes contradictory directions, one centered on Pablo and Apolline, the other on Pablo and Night’s sexually explicit relationship, and the last on the gang and their run-ins with Pablo and Night, doesn’t do any of the storylines any favors. Each one would have benefitted immeasurably from additional time and development onscreen.

 

Better yet, one or even two storylines could have been eliminated in their entirety. Whatever was kept expanded and deepened, even subverted. At a minimum, Eat the Night could have simply avoided crime-drama cliches and attempted something, anything more original or novel. 

 

It’s made all the worse given a talented cast that give Eat the Night their next-level best. Too often, though, Cholbi, Gueneau, and Falé are left to fend for themselves, elevating banal dialogue one moment, adding emotional resonance to an underdeveloped script the next. All three actors, who are all engaging, grounded, and watchable, certainly deserve better from a screenplay badly in need of several more drafts or a complete rethink.

 

Despite its faults story-wise, Eat the Night amply suggests Poggi and Vinel, whatever their skills as scriptwriters, can certainly deliver on a cinematic level. They easily handle the initial interplay between the virtual and offline worlds. While the crime-drama segments, grounded in a familiar, if not entirely unwelcome kitchen-sink realism, aren’t particularly intriguing on a narrative level, they still pop and engage on a visual level. Hopefully, their next effort will align their narrative sensibilities better with their visual ones, elevating the former to match the latter.