The star cast of the movie
“The Night Eats the World”, is a French horror-thriller movie that was released in 2018. The movie was directed by Dominique Rocher and based on a novel written by Pit Agarman. The main character, Sam, was played by Anders Danielsen Lie. The supporting cast of the movie was Golshifteh Farahani playing Sarah and Denis Lavant playing the character Alfred in the movie.
Introduction to the movie ‘The Night Eats the World’
The first scene of the movie ‘The Night Eats the World’, shows us a man named Sam, entering an apartment where a party is going on. Living in Paris and a musician by profession, he has come to see his girlfriend, who has organized the party. The entire place is stuffed with people, who are present even on the staircase, with hardly any place to move. Sam struggles his way through the people and reaches inside, where his girlfriend Fanny greets him.
Sam asks for some tapes which are lying with her, but Fanny dodges him and tells him to wait several times, while she gets busy with other people. After keeping Sam waiting for a long time, she finally tells him that the tapes are lying in the office, at the end of the hall. She instructs him to go there and wait for her and she shall see him there only very soon.
Sam heads towards the office while bumping against a party-goer in a hurry. He finally reaches the office and finds his tapes, but while assembling them, he notices that his nose is bleeding due to the collision with the man at the party. Sam sits on a chair in the office only and tries to relax so that the bleeding is stopped. However, he soon falls asleep on the chair and spends the entire night there.
The movie takes a surprising turn
When he wakes up in the morning, he takes the box of his music tapes with him and starts to move out of the office to his place. But when he opens the door, he finds the place completely ransacked, with blood stains on the walls. He gets alerted and tries to look for the culprit.
On reaching the staircase, he sees Fanny, who has turned into a Zombie. Fanny charges toward him violently after hearing her name from Sam. Sam closes the door, but she bangs the door for some time and then is quiet. Sam looks outside through the window and finds that there are plenty of zombies roaming on the streets with their bodies in badly mutilated shapes.
Sam sees another family just opposite the building, which is struggling against a man-turned-zombie and trying to run away from there in their car. But many zombies trap them in the car and finish them. Sam is petrified by all this and has no choice, but to keep himself locked in the flat only.
He slowly moves to the rooftop of the building, to have a glimpse of the area from the top, but finds destruction everywhere on the roads, and no trace of any human being. Only the flesh-eating men and women, turned into zombies moving slowly on the roads with mutilated bodies all over.
The zombies are silent ones, and don’t make a sound at all but are very violent. He starts to clean the floor for himself when he hears a gunshot. Getting a feeling that the gunshot came from below the floor, he tries to listen to any possible sound, by keeping his ear on the wooden floor.
Another shot hits through the floor area and is very near to him. Sam just peeps through the hole made by the gunshot and finds that a man has shot himself. He breaks the floor with a piece of iron pipe and slips into the lower floor by hanging from a rope. Sam finds that the man had killed his wife before killing himself, as she seemed to be infected from the scratch of a zombie. The woman was tied to a chair. Sam takes the gun into his custody for his own safety and also finds the bullets of the gun in the drawer nearby.
Sam’s fight for survival begins
Taking the help of the gun, he ventures slowly downstairs, to get a feel of the outside. Though Sam finds some zombies just outside the apartment building, he quickly closes the main door of the apartment, before the zombies try to sneak in and bang the door vigorously.
From the office of the apartment, he tries to assemble the keys to all the apartments and also tries to eat whatever he can find there. He starts to visit each one of the apartments of the building to see for any survivors from the Zombie attack.
In one of the apartments, he finds an entire family zombified and a man from that family attacks him. Sam frees himself from that zombified man with difficulty and comes out of the apartment. He closes the door from the outside and puts a cross mark outside the door for identification of the zombie-affected apartment.
In the elevator, Sam finds an elderly man turned into a Zombie, trying to come near to him. Seeming harmless, Sam closes the door of the elevator so that the Zombie is trapped inside it. Then he goes into another apartment, finds some useful stuff there, and assembles them for his own use. Sam also finds some musical instruments there, including some drums, which grab his attention as he himself is a musician. He takes these instruments with him and listens to them in his apartment where he was stationed initially.
The scene outside is as gloomy as it was before, where all the zombies are on the roads with damaged cars and properties. He starts to play the drums and other items loudly and gets completely drowned in the flow of the music. But Sam is oblivious to the fact that he is surrounded by the Zombies. However, he remains unharmed and safe inside.
Sam has to stay long and be patient
Sam tries to cope with the situation and readies himself for the long stay there. He assembles all the foodstuff from the nearby apartments and stores them for himself. He finds another couple dead in one of the apartments and seals that apartment too, for the purpose of ease in the identification of the affected homes. At times, he gets nightmares of zombies trying to get in and eat him up.
But Sam tries to be positive and keeps himself busy by doing exercises and listening to music. He keeps running inside the building and from apartment to apartment while listening to music so that he feels normal from within. While roaming around the building, he again happens to pass through the elevator, where the elderly zombified man is.
Sam tries to talk to him and even calls him Alfred, as he gets to know his name from a visit to his apartment earlier. He saw Alfred’s stethoscope there too, indicating that he was a doctor by profession before turning into a Zombie. But Alfred only reacts in the same zombified way and Sam leaves him there only.
On the rooftop of the apartment building, Sam collects the rainwater in small buckets, objects, jars or whatever he finds there in the apartments. The reason for this is, that the water supply goes off while he is bathing.
Back in the apartment, he tries to relax while sitting in front of Zombie Alfred. Sam even tries to communicate with him, obviously in a one-way conversation only. He shares his feelings and his frustration and tries to ask him whether there is any cure possible for all this. As expected, Alfred can’t and doesn’t reply to him and behaves in the same weird way.
Sam is nearly killed by the zombies
One day, Sam finds a cat wandering here and there outside, amongst the live zombies. He goes down the stairs and opens the main door to see whether he can lure her towards him with food. But while the cat moves further away from him, he is caught by the zombies on the road. Sam hides in a car, but that car is attacked by zombies. However, after much difficulty, he escapes from the car and heads toward his apartment. Enraged, he shoots the cat from the window with his shotgun.
But since he is badly bruised, he thinks that he may have gotten the infection from the bites and the scratches of the zombies, who attacked him. Sam tries to find the medicines there and gets the wounds covered. But he thinks that he is infected, and so needs to finish himself, as he doesn’t want to end up being a zombie.
Sam even puts the gun under his throat and tries to shoot himself, but he can’t pull the trigger and immediately falls asleep. Suddenly he gets up from the noise of the gunshot near his throat, which has gone off accidentally in his sleep and nearly kills him.
Now the frustration starts to creep in
However, Sam is happy that he is not infected and is alive, but then frustration starts to have a grip on him, as there seems to be no way out of there. He creates a fireplace too and tries to remain calm, but the uneasiness starts to take a toll on him. With each passing day, his mental steadfastness is waning away. He starts to react to every sound, that he hears and gets in an alert state every now and then.
As Sam is watching from a window, he imagines the road is empty and he is walking on the road. On the other day, while he is having his drink and watching outside, he finds the road filled with the corpses of the zombies and the area somewhat deserted. This state of mind drives him crazy and he confronts the elderly zombified man in the elevator in frustration.
Ridiculing him, Sam tells him that he is left by his own people there. Sam splashes wine on his face and asks him why he is so boring and always sulking. Sam also tells the zombie that one day he will surely go out, and he shall remain here. The Zombie just makes weird gestures and bangs the door of the elevator. Pissed by his behaviour, Sam breaks his wine bottle on the door of the elevator in a fit of rage.
Sam now tries to experiment, and see whether there are still any zombies left outside. He begins to play the drum set loudly and madly. This produces a lot of noise that the zombies hear which makes them angry. They gather outside his apartment building and try to reach him by piling on each other. Sam goes out to see the zombies who are trying harder to reach him. Sam gets more pissed off with this and begins to beat the drum in front of them too, due to his state of mind.
At last, Sam finds someone sane human being
After some time, Sam is back to normal and even apologizes to the elderly zombie, saying that he was out of his mind and should not have talked to him like that. On the same night, Sam hears the noise of something moving outside his door. He picks up his gun and fires in the direction of the door. When he checks outside from the hole that the gunshot created, he finds a woman who has been hit by his gunshot. Sam drags her inside and tries to arrange emergency medical aid for her. After putting some medicine on her wounds, she loses consciousness while he pleads with her to stay alive.
In the morning, he is relieved that the woman has survived and is having the food that he had kept for her. Sam gets to know that her name is Sarah. Sam asks her about the survivors, to which Sarah tells him that there are not many, but only a few here and there hiding in the apartments. On Sam’s question about how she survived, she answers that she kept moving from one roof to another roof, as she can’t stay in one place for more than a week.
When Sam says that it is safe here, Sarah tells him it is not safe now, especially after the amount of noise he made. She adds that they can come again, as there are so many on the roads. Sam tries to go downstairs but Sarah insists that she also wants to go with him, as she can’t stay in the room.
While going downstairs, Sarah happens to see the elderly Zombie man Alfred and is shocked. Sam tries to pacify her, saying that he won’t hurt her. Though Sarah is sceptical, she tells Sam that he can do whatever he likes, as it is his place only.
Though she passes her time there by enjoying the music played by Sam and other activities, she is not feeling good from within. Sam makes a hole in the door marked by him earlier so that he can aim the gun inside. He shoots the zombie-turned people inside to prevent the infection from spreading.
Sarah tries to persuade Sam to escape from there
One day, Sam comes to his apartment from some nearby place in the building and can’t find Sarah in the room. He looks for her all over the place and ultimately finds her on the rooftop. She looks gloomy and tells Sam that she is looking for a way out of that place. Sam tries to convince her that she is safe there, especially when there is no dearth of food, at least for some time.
However, Sarah says that one has to practice jumping over the buildings so that they can reach a safer place. Sam is not convinced and says that the streets are full of people, and if she doesn’t find a safer place, she is dead. Sarah says they can’t be holed up there forever and must try to get out of that hell hole, as the zombies can enter anytime and finish them.
Sam again tries to make her understand that there is no point going outside, and these Zombies won’t enter inside. Sarah gets agitated and warns him, that in that case he will ultimately go insane after some time and would kill himself in the building only. She leaves for downstairs and Sam too follows her.
Sam gets a shock of a lifetime
Sam even hears a loud sound, probably of a door banging by Sarah who is inside the room. Sam pleads to her to open the door, as he thinks that she is right and they must leave that place. When she doesn’t open the door, he realizes that it was just his hallucination and the scene goes back to where Sam is pleading with her to stay alive after he shoots her.
She is actually dead from that initial gunshot only, which Sam had fired through the door after hearing the noise coming from outside. Sam mourns Sarah’s death and lights candles near her body in order to repent. But Sam has to move ahead, and he decides to finally leave the apartment. When he searches Sarah’s bag, he finds some grapnels and rope which Sarah probably used to jump from one roof to another.
He burns all the tapes, for which he came to that place initially. Sam also sets the zombified elderly man Alfred free, who goes inside an apartment, while Sam closes the door of that apartment.
The burning of the tapes sets the fire alarm on, which attracts the zombies outside. They break the door and come marching inside the building while trying to attack Sam. Though Sam kills some of them with his shotgun, there are too many who come inside. Sam somehow manages to lock himself in the same elevator and from there, manages to reach the rooftop of the building.
Sam’s final escape bid begins
Even though chased by a zombie there too, Sam ties the rope from his building and swings the grapnel far toward the other building across the street, so that it can get hooked up with something for him to jump. He succeeds, but after jumping from the rooftop, he gets banged on the wall of the opposite building across the street and loses consciousness.
After coming back to his senses, he slowly manages to reach the roof of the building. He has a better view of the surroundings now and he examines every direction and every building nearby.
Perhaps, he has to continue to move from one rooftop to another, in order to reach a safer destination. Perhaps, this is his only hope. Perhaps, that is why Sarah guided him to find the way out of there, rather than get himself holed up in the building.
