The Night Eats the World has been divisive among those who love the zombie apocalypse films. I get that…though that is pretty much a true statement of all zombie/infected films now. It is obviously the byproduct of genre oversaturation. But personally, I applaud Dominique Rocher’s low budget indie film for presenting a genuinely fresh take to an overcrowded genre. Nobody can argue against how influential this film has been, having spawned two remakes from two separate countries less than four years after its release.

For those of you who do not know, The Night Eats the World is a low-budget French zombie film directed by Dominique Rocher. Its premise is remarkably simple. An introvert named Sam goes to his ex-girlfriend’s new loft to get back a box of cassettes that she mistakenly took from him. It is possible Sam was invited to the party she is throwing, but Sam is clearly not interested in mingling. He just wants his tapes, but his ex keeps giving him the run around until finally she tells him to wait in her office, the only quiet room in the house, until she can come and speak with him alone. Sam follows her instructions, locks the door, and waits long enough to fall asleep, which only takes about two minutes.

Lucky Sam. He just survived a zombie apocalypse.  

If the plot sounds a little bit 28 Days Later…, don’t worry. That is about where similarities end. In 28 Days Later, Jim starts off by curiously trying to unravel a mystery on the empty London streets. In stark contrast, Sam seems alright staying put in an empty multi-level Paris complex that he has all to himself.

As a film, The Night Eats the World revels in silence. In the complex, Sam has nothing but his thoughts and his one safely trapped zombie companion Alfred who is not good at small talk. Hell, even the zombies in this film are eerily quiet. But the film’s quietness, which juxtaposes well with Sam’s talent as a musician, is misleading. In fact, I would not fault you for feeling that The Night Eats the World is the first zombie apocalypse film that not all that interested in zombies.

But the further into the film you get, the more you realize that Rocher’s decision to make The Night Eats the World a low-stakes zombie film is actually quite purposeful. As we see in The Night Eats the World’s cousin film, the South Korean #Alive (which credits the same source material) the isolated in an apartment setup could had easily still placed survival front and center. But Rocher is much more interested in depicting one man’s struggle with loneliness and depression, and this is what has made his zombie entry contentious among some horror fans, but its also what makes it unique. Sam is not really interested in living, and he is just barely interested in not dying. Though some may find watching the ways Sam passes his time a bit tedious, those who can tolerate a slow burn may find something universally human in Sam’s desperate struggle to maintain sanity. Especially when we consider it as a metaphor for what we know about his life prior to the apocalypse.

However, The Night Eats the World is still a French film, so even though survival comes relatively easy to Sam, the film is still fairly dark and nihilistic, especially in comparison to #Alive. The horrible imagining of the zombies, many missing limbs, is almost alone worth also worth the watch. They look nasty. And the times we have enough information to piece together the histories of those who died often reveals something tragic and terrible. But perhaps the film’s biggest tragedy comes in the second half, when we are treated to an unexpected plot twist that forces viewers to re-evaluate all the choices Sam has made up to this point.

Though divisive, Rocher does exactly what he wants to accomplish with The Night Eats the World. In depicting a world whose main occupant is the walking dead, the film ends up offering some really insightful observations on how we all should live.