What has made the walking dead so successful and has made them the quintessential modern monster is undoubtedly their versatility and variety of potential meanings. From symbols of the consumer society to a summary of the banality of our lives, from a monstrous threat to the inherent violence in humans to a distorted reflection of our miseries. In the case of ‘The night devours the world‘, which you can see on Prime Video, are the counterpoint to a human being left excruciatingly alone when the apocalypse arrives.
A young man who, after a party, runs into the end of the zombie world in a Paris apartment from which he cannot leave. And at first he manages to survive and even entertain himself, beither with the most insubstantial activities, or contemplating from the balcony the point and end of civilization, well maintaining dialogues for breams with a zombie locked in an elevator. But he soon begins to think that he does not want to see himself die in a Kafkaesque dystopia.
There will be surprises in your adventure, but of course these do not consist of locating a clandestine laboratory where the vaccine for the zombie virus is, but in new encounters in your apartment and in other ways of facing an event whose greatest dangers are loneliness and melancholia. ‘The night devours the world’ can be understood as a kind of ‘I am a legend’ only with the poor parts, and therein lies its attraction.
The charm of this little French film by Dominique Rocher, who was also responsible for the script for the extremely curious ‘La bruma’ and the sadly unpublished miniseries ‘La corde’ in Spain, lies in the originality of the tone and the proposal. A different proposal for an end of the world just as enigmatic as all the others.
