My dear readers, though I don’t believe it has attracted the notice of anyone in my particular social set, I sometimes find myself adrift at larger gatherings. I certainly cannot claim to have ever been the proverbial “life” of a party, holding court in a circle of admiring onlookers with banter and tasteful anecdotes. The slasher films of the 1980s have made me achingly familiar with various brands of class clowns and cut-ups and yet it does not seem to be within the natural breadth of my abilities to imitate their merry antics. There is a parlor trick I have have been working on as of late in the hopes of winning some popular favor but thus far the effect has been diminished by the low rate of surviving rabbits.

Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie), a Parisian musician with a recently soured romance on his hands, has similar misgivings about large gatherings. He reluctantly attends a raucous party in the hopes of recovering some inadvertently pilfered recordings and manages to catch a bit of a snooze in a back office while waiting for one last bit of closure with his former paramour. When he wakes, he finds the world to be a tad askew. A wave of carnivorous undead have taken over the streets and, at least as far as he can see, Sam is the last living person. 

But even though life as he has known it is over, there is still plenty to keep Sam occupied. There’s tidying up after a party turned bloodbath. There’s his musical career to think of, which Sam refuses to give up on despite the noticeable lack of potential audience members. And there’s even Alfred (Denis Lavant), a zombie trapped in an elevator shaft with whom Sam can make pleasant, if somewhat one-sided conversation. With all this activity, Sam hardly finds a reason to leave the apartment building and given the consistent crowd of animated cadavers piled at his doorstep, staying indoors seems a sensible approach. But confinement and solitude take their toll and Sam is forced to confront the very real possibility that his stores of both food and sanity may eventually dwindle.

Beyond the sparse opportunities for dialogue, The Night Eats The World manages to be a profoundly hushed film. This particular batch of the undead are sensitive to clamor of any kind and Sam lives a primarily inaudible existence. And the zombies are hardly clanging about the place themselves, emitting little more than a faint joint crack or two at their most mobile and energized. Quietude is the film’s greatest asset, adding an extra layer of torture for its musically-minded protagonist and, better still, providing a lovely platform for Denis Lavant, one of contemporary cinema’s finest silent performers. Though some of their scenes are a bit bogged down by Sam’s tedious desire to communicate, a little peace and quiet is all Mr. Lavant needs to imbue a shambling, murderous corpse with more humor and humanity than can be found in most living characters.

The Night Eats The World runs 93 minutes and is rated TV-14.