Sam goes to his ex-wife's apartment in Paris to pick up some tapes. She and her new boyfriend are having a huge party with loud music, a ton of people, and no time for him when he just wants his possessions. After sitting and drinking alone for while, he's understandably fed up and she finally sends him to an empty office to find them himselve. He gets hit in the head when he ventures out of the room and gets a bloody nose. Sam sits for a while and eventually falls asleep just as some commotion occurs outside the room. He wakes up to an empty and wrecked apartment with blood splattering the walls. The entire city is overrun with zombies with no other humans in sight. Sam has to decide what he will do being the only person he is aware of still living in the world.
The Night Eats the World is a different zombie film than most. It takes the beginning scene of 28 Days Later or the first season of The Walking Dead and keeps the main character isolated. Sam is essentially alone for the entire film save for the raging party at the very beginning. It's such a stark comparison to see the party full of people, with projections on the wall and lights flashing, to what it looks like in the morning: a ruin of broken furniture, blood stains, dead bodies, and the spare zombie here and there. Sam is surprisingly clear headed and logic with his course of action. He secures the building, marks the aparment with the zombie, traps a zombie in the elevator, gathers food in all the apartments, and measures each bit for rationing. He finds an apartment to be his base after struggling to clean the one he was originally in.
Being alone takes a toll and he finds ways to get out aggression and create music by making instruments out of found objects (after the drum set he found attracts too much zombie attention). Over time, he develops his own routine for each day. He improves his aim by paintballing zombies and becomes a much better opponent to the zombies. He plays music, looks outside, runs around the apartments, looks through people's things, listens to music, and listens to the tapes his daughter made. He thinks a lot and wonders if anyone he knows is even alive, even musing that his mother is dead because of sympathetic personality. When he found dead bodies in the building, he wrapped them as much as he could and laid out their possessions and pictures around them. I thought it was a sweet and human thing to do to honor people he didn't know. The film is largely devoid of talking because Sam spends most of his time alone. Most of his time is just spent surviving and staying in the present to avoid thinking about the bleak future.
There are a few emergencies Sam has to address. The first day is full of tension when there are actual zombies free in the apartment complex and he has to secure everything. After that, he gets a little more comfortable yet still has nightmares of zombies breaking down his door. They are the ever present threat. When running water stops flowing, he sets up containers on the roof to collect rain water. During his cat excursion, he's scratched by a zombie and prepares to kill himself if he feels he's changing. When he's running low on food, he has to break into the zombie infested apartment, but it's only a temporary fix. The building only has so much food. He calmly addresses each issue until his own emotions start to overcome him. He was lonely before this ever started and that's why he adapted to this new world so well. Near the end, he starts to do reckless things that will attract zombies to get his emotions out even though it endangers him and threatens his worse fear. Sam also has to face the inevitable conclusion that he has to leave the relative safety of the apartment.
The zombies themselves are like most: dead, able to run, eat human flesh, attracted by sound or sight, and seem to live forever. They go into a twitching stasis when there's nothing around to catch their attention. Sam observes them much of the time and even uses the one captive in the elevator, named Alfred, to speak to. The zombies are really just a cipher for him to work out his own issues. He screams at and berates Alfred for being an awful father when he's actually talking about himself. Another character he talks to embodies his own conflicting ideas about staying or leaving and how his way of surviving isn't really living. It's never revealed why the world became this way or even how the disease is transmitted. Sam doesn't know and has only seen the precious few people he saw alive turned into zombies.
The Night Eats the World is a unique zombie film that focuses more on the human protagonist than the zombies. We see his mental state deteriorate as time goes on and we see his practical way to survive. The loneliness he felt before the end of the world becomes much more literal. I enjoyed the sparse dialogue and how the details of his background are interwoven into the story in subtle ways. I enjoyed this film. I highly recommend this if you are looking for something a little off the beaten path.
My rating: 4.5/5 fishmuffins
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