Last year, Jane Schoenbrun publicly contemplated the mediated self with their astounding genre effort “I Saw the TV Glow.” The buzzy Sundance entry imagined a monster-of-the-week TV show literally connecting two realities: a fantastical narrative bridge that allowed Schoenbrun to theorize at length about the fictional worlds we love when we’re young and the real people they can help us turn into.

The economic interest in our culture’s most aspirational identity is ever-increasing. Attention is a competitive social marketplace as hell-bent on fostering self-fabulation as it is normalizing the microtransaction (and for what it’s worth, both things happen for the same basic reason). In “Eat the Night,” co-directors Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel take a less literal but decidedly more cynical approach than Schoenbrun’s earlier gender-centric film — exploring instead adjacent themes of contemporary identity and spotlighting defiance in the face of oppression by class. It’s...