Relationships and Psychological Impact In ‘The Night Eats The World’

“At least she didn’t die of something unfair, like cancer or a car accident. She died like everyone else. With everyone else. Dead is the norm now. I’m the one who’s not normal.” For Zombie Fans It’s rare that a film about the walking dead aptly explores the emotional underpinnings of the human struggle for meaning. Sometimes, even when we’re not actually alone, we still are. And sometimes, it takes an event of drastic magnitude in order to come to terms with that reality, reminding us precisely of what we have to lose if we don’t make meaning for ourselves. Dominique Rocher’s indie post-apocalyptic zombie thriller, The Night Eats the World, succeeds incredibly in doing just that, offering viewers a relatively concise, yet compact journey alongside the lone survivor of a zombie outbreak in Paris. Think I Am Legend, but less grandiose, with much less deliberately self-destructive, existential angst (sorry, Will).

On the contrary, the protagonist of The Night Eats the World, Sam, played to understatedly stoic perfection by Anders Danielson Lie, is not presented as anyone particularly heroic or filled with machismo. He’s not trying to make sense of or fix a planet bereft of order and sanity. He’s just a regular guy; a regular guy who goes to his ex-girlfriend’s wild house party one night to pick up some of his leftover belongings and ends up sleeping through the end of the world. And before you ask, yes, this is an entirely possible scenario. Now, if you’re anything like me, th…