[CRITICAL] THE NIGHT HAS DEVOURED THE WORLD

The dead leaves gather to the shovel, the dead-the living and the regrets also. Dominique Rock the shows with THE NIGHT HAS DEVOURED THE WORLD, zombie movie, French or more specifically parisian.

Reviews are often parties of a premise that is discouraging, according to which the fantastic cinema was struggling to print the collective unconscious of French cinema, because its decor was incompatible with the credibility that the audience places usually figures horrific anglo-saxon. This theory that we called previously ” the problem of decor of French “, seems to be baseless since a few months by a new generation of filmmakers that uses wisely the resources at his disposal, while capitalizing on the fact that the public is already familiar with the codes and conventions of genres and sub-genres invested, and that there is no longer a issue of providing ersatz models hollywood to ensure a show believable and intense.

In the case of revelation, the cinema has taught us that there were two schools of survival : shelter in a safe place and do not move, or draw the road without lingering anywhere. THE NIGHT HAS DEVOURED THE WORLD chooses the first option in a Paris ravaged by an epidemic of zombie; like what being French is not enough today to escape the threats of the cinema of its kind. This bias is close to the camera, allows to situate the action in a context of paris, while justifying that the intimate prevails most of the time on the spectacular. Who says zombie, ” said feeling of oppression ? Not necessarily, since the bias of Dominic Rock lies precisely in the deconstruction of the usual formula of the genre, where a peaceful existence and well-ordered ends up working badly, not to say cannibalisée by the disorder, the fury and the din of orders macabre.

The film begins by placing Sam, the protagonist in the middle of a feast, where he must fight in the decor cramped apartment crowded with noceurs, to stay in the frame. The living, too, can sometimes be terribly bulky. And then the night to pass, and upon waking, Sam discovers that the dead have replaced the living and the silence of the new day, has taken its revenge on the hubbub of the evening. Strangely, where one expects of hues from dull, cold light or overwhelming, where usually this type of story calls for a grainy image, THE NIGHT HAS swallowed THE WORLD is bathed in a soft light, fall colors and rather hot. “The Night” was always the guest of honor of the fantastic cinema, as evidenced by its presence prominent in the titles of films to be infected (The Night of the living dead, Night of The fools live, both signed George A. Romero). Here, even if the light of the day has survived to the apocalypse, the night leaves its mark on the world of its footprint ; it remains superimposed as a requiem subliminal.

Without great surprise, after the daze Sam follows a phase of exploration of the property in which the protagonist is a recluse. Force is to recognize that it is an exercise used in the genre, this increase in hostile territory is served by an exceptional work on the sound, especially for out-of-field, giving, giving life and rage at the environment around the scenery where the action is circumscribed. In this reappropriation of everyday surroundings and commonplace, our hero going so far as to allow the parentheses of decadent indulgence and unwinding nervous, valves to areas of tension regular in the story, not remember the bad manners delectable of the child delivered to him-even in Mom, I missed the plane.

Then of course, no longer feel the stares of his peers on the self, it is good, but in the long loneliness outweighs the moral of Sam, and this is where that creeps in all the melancholy of THE NIGHT HAS DEVOURED THE WORLD. It should be noted two details fort about about Sam : he is a prisoner of a building that he was supposed to leave after a breakup; on the other, his interpreter, Anders Danielsen Lie does not seek to obliterate his Norwegian accent. Two clues that suggest that the apocalypse or not, Sam is no longer in his place in Paris, certainly far from his family and loved ones. We thus empathize with a character faced more than ever to its uniqueness, its individuality, which appears almost as an anomaly, because the world seems to be uniformly dead and abnormally alive. What a paradox that great in this context, that the presence of the zombie played by Denis Lavant, as Sam deals with a quasi-friend and yet it underlines all the more his loneliness.

Adapting the novel of the same name of Pit Agarmen, Dominique Rock is risky in a year of drama which is called before all the nihilism, where the last survivor would, in the end, the executor of the will of the world. Therefore, we can expect to see a logic in the narrative which leads inexorably to the protagonist as the viewer, to a form that is unforgiving of despair, a demonstration by the absurd, that which is not yet part of the death, already belongs to the forfeiture and the deadly. It was without counting on the breath of life that infuses the music of David Gubitsch, rich in human voices, making them correspond to each mood of the film, its music scene. In this world of silence is misleading, we can also see the rage, the distress, and moments of poetry impromptu, as when Sam transforms everyday objects into percussion. We stay interlocked in front of his unusual instruments, such as in front of their musician, in a world where lives are orphans, their languages and their functions.

Arkham

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