The Wire + Ready Player One: This is the amazing cocktail of this French movie that you must see at the cinema

What is it about?

Pablo and his sister Apolline escape from everyday life by playing Darknoon, the video game they grew up with. One day, Pablo meets Knight, whom he informs about his little deals, and leaves Apollina. As the game nears its end, two boys incur the wrath of a rival gang…

Eat The Night Featured in Cinematographers’ Fortnight and in French competition at the Champs-Élysées Film Festival, Eat The Night is a little gem that needs to be discovered. This second feature from duo Jonathan Vinnell and Caroline Pogue (Jessica Forever) is a surprising cocktail of virtual worlds and tragedy, leaning towards a thriller.

The whole point of the film is based on its hybridization: it dared to mix the worlds of French drama and video games. If some see it as a form of Ready Player One in the fashion of French auteur films, the real influence of Eat The Night is not the Spielberg film, but the universally recognized American series, The Wire!

The film is influenced by the TV series The Wire

The directors particularly drew on the darkness of the HBO cult series, but also on the way the story was told: “Wire (…) freed us from the idea of ​​organizing the story around not one main but several central characters.“, – they note in the press kit.

The plot of Eat The Night focuses on three characters, Pablo (Theo Cholbi) and his little sister Apollina (Lila Geneo), as well as Night (Erwan Kepoa Fale), who becomes close to Pablo through petty trafficking. The film aims to talk specifically about the families we create and how we find shelter.

One such refuge is a virtual world invented from scratch for Eat The Night: The Game Darknoon. “I live here and I feel better than in my life“, says one of the characters of the film.

“It’s a game whose story the movie never tells. We see them playing, but we don’t know at what stakes. We are interested in the people who upload it. What they say to each other, the feelings that are born, are woven through it. I’m a gamer, but I really like zoning out in games with little action.

The game taught me to see wandering, contemplative cinema in a different way

The game taught me to see wandering and contemplative cinema in a different way. Gus Van Sant, Bela Tarr or Apichatpong Weerasetakuli were an aesthetic shock when I became interested in cinema.Jonathan Winell points out.

and added: “That’s why Eat the Night tries to excavate the possible galleries between play and life. The difference is death. We lose the game, we start over. In fact, violence can kill.

Following the highly acclaimed Woven Island, L’Île sans fin, a French documentary that explored the virtual world, Eat The Night continues this immersion through an interesting mix of fiction and genres.

Note that this second feature film is less experimental than the previous tandem. Jessica forever. “This film derives from a strong desire for cinema, confronting narrative history more than Jessica Forever, while maintaining a desire for hybridization..”

If you want to find the duo’s previous films, short and long, they are available on the MUBI platform, which offers a retrospective of their work in time for the theatrical release of Eat The Night.

MUBI’s program focuses on Caroline Pogue and Jonathan Winnell:

• Jessica forever
• While we still have the rifle
• angry child
• You must watch the fire or burn in it

Eat The Night is currently in theaters.