French Noir Finds Focus With a Dead MMORPG

Over more than half a century on the market, video games have achieved true cultural ubiquity — arguably more than narrative filmmaking in the current day. How wrong it is, then, that movies have largely continued to show gaming in a shallow, nonliteral manner, portrayed as thoughtless joy buzzers, rather than indicating how a title handles or commands attention. Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel don’t take such shortcuts with their thriller “Eat the Night.” Though the narrative spine is a turf war between small-time drug dealers, the Cannes-launched French feature searches for its big emotions in the digital realm, with long in-game sequences that follow a teenager compelled to escape the bleak world around her.

On the cusp of adulthood, the pale Apolline (Lila Gueneau) spends her days roaming the lands of “Darknoon,” a “World of Warcraft”-like massive multiplayer online sandbox. With her avatar’s oversized sword and comically skimpy battle armor, Apolline takes on one quest after another, rarely leaving the folds of her bedroom. Her gay older brother Pablo (Théo Cholbi) sometimes logs in to play too. When he goes to work, he hops on his too-flashy motorcycle to deal MDMA candies for cash. One day, Pablo recruits a young Black man named Night (Erwan Kepoa Falé) as a business partner and, soon after, the pair begin a tryst.

This early act of “Eat the Night” can seem plainly cosmetic. Falé and Cholbi find subtle notes to the pair’s interplay, but the actors don’t share the fiery chemistry to launch a passionate, doomed romance; their first kiss is a bit of a rushed surprise. Meanwhile, Apolline and Pablo’s home life isn’t fleshed out beyond a glum impression. (Their grump father, hooked up to an oxygen tank in another room, is mostly a structuring absence.) But interspersed through it all is the ticking clock of “Darknoon,” which is planning to shut down its servers after 20 years online. The world is about…