The Night Eats the World

I love a good, deep movie filled with symbolism and thought provoking scenes. But when it comes to horror flicks, I want to leave my intellect behind and just simply get creeped out. This is an unusual zombie movie. It is not scary, or even creepy. This movie is more about survival and loneliness than battling the undead.

Enter Sam. He goes to his former girlfriend's apartment to pick up his things. After some awkward conversation amidst some overly loud music and a crowd of party guests, his former girlfriend sends him down the hall to the office for his things. You can feel Sam's uneasiness with the people and the noise. Avoiding the loud crowd, he sits in the office and finally falls asleep. When he wakes up, the world, as he knows it is gone, replaced by flesh-eating zombies. We never know how or why.

This is the story of his survival, alone, isolated and trapped, in an apartment building in Paris. The first part of the movie was interesting as he searches the building, marking off apartments that harbor undead residents. Going into the various apartments, he begins gathering food in tote bags like a doomsday shopping trip.

What's missing here? A couple of things. We don't know Sam, and very little happens in the movie to really clue us in as to who he is, and what makes him tick. We get glimpses but nothing concrete to make us care about him and hope for his survival.

The second thing missing is zombie interaction. This is less of a horror movie and more of a psychological study on being isolated and alone, and the effect it has on one's mind. If you're looking for a movie that makes you think, with a side of zombies, this might do the trick. There is definitely a lot to think about here.

Its well acted but when the only survivor of a zombie apocalypse is a self-absorbed, unlikable upper middle class French muso (who makes mindnumbingly stupid survival decisions) then the film looses credibility.

Its also useful that French zombies have short attention spans when we get into the avaunt garde music.

The was a pretty good movie right up to the end. To me, a bad ending ruins a movie. That is what happened here.

For starters, the zombies are totally, utterly mute. Believe or not, it's quite scary! In the real world, a simple cough would get anybody killed in an instant... More generally, one of the most powerful features of this movie is the strength of the overwhelming silence: in the streets, buildings, cars, rooms, hallways... Gone is the human agitation we have grown so used to!

Then, the setting in beautiful Paris, downtown-style. Lots of nice Haustmanian buildings. This comes in sharp contrast to the horror that awaits our character at virtually every corner.

The story fits on a simple sheet of paper, but the interest of this movie lies elsewhere. As some reviewers have described it before, it's about survival of the worst kind. I found myself planning what actions the "hero" should be taking to survive, ahead of him and, ticked, he went through each of them! In this regard, it is a pretty consistent movie which feels quite real.

My biggest complain is about the ending, something that a lot of French movies typically fail to do properly (just like the Americans and Asians, but for some other reasons): there is absolutely no closure to the storyline, far from it. I won't get into the details here, but please be warned that you will be left with a virtually limitless number of possible endings for this movie, way too many in my opinion to feel comfortable with it.

The poster and description don't really sell this movie correctly. They sort of hint at this bloodbath zombie world. And while there are hints of that, it is much more of a slice of life drama and psychological study if anything.

There are obviously zombies but not they are not the main focus. There are hints of The Omega Man in here but I think it's much more thoughtful, it tries to look at what life would actually be like.

The film is slow and there are like 40 lines of dialogue in the whole movie, it might even be less. This doesn't make it bad or anything but it does make some parts drag ever so slightly.