In this tender French art film, the server shutdown of a multiplayer videogame sparks a criminal romance
Altered Innocence's Eat the Night has a limited screening this week at Screenland Armour.
Eat the Night. // Altered Innocence
Film distributor Altered Innocence continues its streak of bringing features that, in most timelines simply wouldn’t exist, to American audiences. Each one, even those that stray too far from our personal enjoyment, feel like a little treat built in a lab just to remind us that capital-“a” Art still thrives. Today’s entry (current screening at Screenland Armour) is no exception. As a deep dive into the parasocial relationships we carve in our online space, and threading that through the meatspace, sometimes humanity deserves both the curse and the freedom that comes from your computer announcing “Connection Impossible.”
The queer French romance-thriller Eat the Night follows Pablo (Théo Cholbi), a small-time drug dealer, and his teenage sister Apolline (Lila Gueneau). They’ve forged an unbreakable bond through their shared obsession with the online video game Darknoon. When Pablo falls for the mysterious Night (Erwan Kepoa Falé), he gets swept up in their liaison, abandoning his sister to deal with the impending shutdown of their digital haven alone. As Pablo’s reckless choices provoke the wrath of a dangerous rival gang, the end of their virtual life draws near with personal and worldwide apocalyptic stakes.
Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s second feature explores the limits of hybrid visuals and pushes the expectations of narrative storytelling. Eat the Night weaves between a real-world France and the virtual world of Darknoon, which is realized through the creation of an original role-playing game/platform used for the production.
Eat the Night. // Altered Innocence
The film, which premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival as part of the Directors’ Fortnight section—a real thing at Cannes, apparently!—is impossibly French. The decisions around where the balance of time goes here, between IRL and digital spaces, and whose narrative takes the lead, are all unpredictable and counterintuitive to what an American film with similar dynamics would bend toward.
Darknoon itself, as a fake game with a detailed, crafted digital playground, is simply miles beyond what even big-budget films would create for the screen. Each cut to the gameworld shows an engine and details that scream “labor of love” in an indie flick, and this attention allows deliberately awkward in-game moments to hang on tiny performance choices—muted, subtle acting choices amid a Warcraft-like MMO that can pivot on a dime to monster battles across huge battlefields. The queer romance it mirrors in the real world is somewhat adrift from its central premise for a large chunk of the film. As engaging as the leads are, the low-level drug-running enterprise that turns rival gangs against each other is in such a separate world that it feels like you’re flipping between channels and catching parts of another film entirely. This is more of a lull than a letdown, as the flick’s third act quickly merges these characters and storylines into something with greater balance and the ability for Fortnite and Judgment Night to bounce back and forth.
The digital apocalypse that will sever the ties of many online relationships also delivers on its narrative promise at a time when American audiences are teetering on the verge of a TikTok ban, and what that would mean for a chunk of society. As having the hose smacked from your hand becomes an increasing online situation, Eat the Night will only gain relevance as its viewers bask in a learned trauma of having worlds ripped from your fingertips.
Eat the Night is running at Screenland Armour right now. Find your way up north for it.
