Eat the Night – BFI London Film Festival 2024

Writers: Guillaume Bréaud, Clémence Madeleine- Perdrillat, Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel

Directors: Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel

Violent and sexy, Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s movie is like a teenage coming-of-age story for adults. Centred around a video game called Darknoon, where players roam a world like Minecraft, Eat the Night follows the lives of two teenage siblings with absent parents in urban France. But when the makers of Darknoon announce that the game will come to an end on Winter Solstice, Pablo and Apo are thrown into real life, where violence comes with consequences.

Pablo, the elder sibling, doesn’t play the game as much as he’s used to. He’s out on his green Kawasaki selling ecstasy tablets, which he makes in an empty farmhouse on the edge of the city. Apo is still at school but spends most of her free time deep in the game, directing her avatar around the fantasy world. She misses the evenings when she and Pablo would kill at least 1,000 other characters who dared to walk into her digital landscape. She’s the more devoted of the two, and she even has a box under her bed containing a replica of her online costume.

One day, Pablo gets jumped by a rival gang fighting over territory. He’s beaten to the ground but helped up by a shopworker called Night. Pablo is looking to expand his business and so invites Night to work with him. The work arrangement becomes sexual when both men are euphoric from another gang brawl.

As Pablo and Night spend all their time together, Apo becomes increasingly lonely, especially as Darknoon’s end draws close. She says she’s not jealous of her brother’s new relationship, but she clearly is. Pablo tells her to find a new friend. Eventually, she finds one online.

With clean, unfussy camerawork, the unpredictable story is the main focus here, and the relationship between the two siblings is convincing. As Pablo, Théo Chobli has the innocent but dangerous swagger that Pasolini would have loved to have captured on screen. Chobli plays Pablo like a beautiful Jean Genet gangster with irresistible charm.

Lila Gueneau is the ingenious Apo, sensing the tragedy to come. Gueneau’s part could so easily be overshadowed by her brother’s relationship with Night, but the actor gives Apo enough resilience to make her part integral to the story. Rising French star Erwan Kepoa Falé (Winter Boy and Passages) is perhaps a little too old to play Night, but his calm demeanour is the perfect complement to Chobli’s fiery nature. No one mentions his age in the film, and neither do they comment on the colour of his skin. However, racism is implied at the film’s end.

The graphics of the computer game are suitably primitive at first, but as the film progresses, Poggi and Vinel give the avatars a more human appearance. And the last game scene, as Darknoon closes shop, is surprisingly moving, even receiving gasps from the audience in its festival screening. Eat the Night is Shakespearean in its ambition to tell a love story surrounded by so much vengeful violence. Romeo and Romeo never looked so good.

Eat the Night is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.