We all have roles to play, in games and in life. How we connect to each other, online and offline, and in-between, matters. When we connect it means something different than it did for other generations. Generation Z are faced with a new loneliness but also a new desire to connect.
The gulf of interpersonal interaction has widened. We do not define ourselves by our socialization, so much as we are self-defined by what we find when we turn inward. We can cultivate our own cult of personality. We can do it online. We can wear the good armor with the nice colors. We can do it in person. We can dress in fluorescent flourishes and outwardly express ourselves through what we have. We have become the products of the digital age and we are not what we own but what we choose, now that we may choose anything from the internet, speaks to the truth of our identity.
In Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s Eat the Night, a brother and sister play an online game called Darknoon, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. This is how they connect and experience each other. The bad news hits the game servers are winding down and there’s only going to be so much time to finish the game.
While Appoline (Lila Gueneau) commits herself to finishing her character, her drug-dealing brother Pablo (Théo Cholbi) develops a real-life romance with a man called Night (Erwin Kepoa Falé), as the two drift dangerously closer to an encroaching drug war. The ties that bind us between virtual and practical reality blur as the siblings try to keep their lives and their virtual bonding sessions together.
Shot cooly with consideration for color and especially The Vibe, Raphaël Vandenbussche’s photography blurs the game world of Darknoon with its real-life counterpart. The film is physical, alarming, and nihilistic in its intersectional between virtual and real-life liminal planes. It drifts between them on a knife’s edge, slowly turning over its style, until it finds purchase by the ever-escalating stakes of the climax.
It’s rare for videogames and life to blend so seamlessly in narrative fiction, while bridging the gap between meaning. Eat the Night capably handles the split, finding purpose and nuance in the divisions between the roles we play and what they mean to the connections we build.